Revolution in the Mailbox: Your Guide to Successful Direct Mail Fundraising

Other Jossey-Bass Publications by Mal Warwick: How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters, 0-7879-5652-X The Five Stra...

Author: Mal Warwick

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Other Jossey-Bass Publications by Mal Warwick: How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters, 0-7879-5652-X The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success: A Mission-Based Guide to Achieving Your Goals, 0-7879-4994-9 Fundraising on the Internet: The ePhilanthropyFoundation.Org’s Guide to Success Online, 0-7879-6045-4 Ten Steps to Fundraising Success: Choosing the Right Strategy for Your Organization, 0-7879-5674-0 Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3: Raise More Money with Direct Mail Tests, 0-7879-6712-2

Other Fundraising Titles from Jossey-Bass: Inspired Philanthropy: Your Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Giving Plan, 2nd Edition, Tracy Gary & Melissa Kohner, 0-7879-6410-7 Relationship Fundraising: A Donor-Based Approach to the Business of Raising Money, 2nd Edition, Ken Burnett, 0-7879-6089-6 Selling Social Change (Without Selling Out): Earned Income Strategies for Nonproﬁts, Andy Robinson, 0-7879-6216-3 Opening Doors: Pathways to Diverse Donors, Diana S. Newman, Council on Foundations, 0-7879-5884-0 Winning Grants Step by Step, 2nd Edition, Mim Carlson, 0-7879-5876-X Conducting a Successful Capital Campaign, Second Edition, Kent E. Dove, 0-7879-4989-2 The Grantwriter’s Start-Up Kit, Creed C. Black, Tom Ezell, Rhonda Ritchie, Successful Images, Inc., 0-7879-5233-8 Secrets of Successful Grantsmanship, Susan L. Golden, 0-7879-0306-X The Insider’s Guide to Grantmaking, Joel J. Orosz, 0-7879-5239-9 Hidden Assets, Diane L. Hodiak, John S. Ryan, 0-7879-5351-2 Transforming Fundraising: A Practical Guide to Evaluating and Strengthening Fundraising to Grow with Change, Judith E. Nichols, 0-7879-4495-5 Fund Raisers: Their Careers, Stories, Concerns, and Accomplishments, Margaret A. Duronio, Eugene R. Tempel, 0-7879-0307-8 The Fundraising Planner: A Working Model for Raising the Dollars You Need, Terry & Doug Schaff, 0-7879-4435-1 Preparing Your Capital Campaign, Marilyn Bancel, 0-7879-5247-8 Developing Your Case for Support, Timothy L. Seiler, 0-7879-5245-1 Planning Special Events, James S. Armstrong, 0-7879-5248-6 Building Your Direct Mail Program, Gwyneth J. Lister, 0-7879-5529-9 Planning and Implementing Your Major Gifts Campaign, Suzanne Irwin-Wells, 0-7879-5708-9

Read This Book . . .

• • • if you serve in a leadership role in a nonproﬁt organization as executive director,

development director, controller, ﬁnancial manager, or marketing director, or as a member of the board of trustees. • • • if you’re contemplating a fundraising, development, or membership-building pro-

gram for your organization. • • • if you contribute money or time to a public interest group or a charity. • • • if you’re managing a political campaign or running for public ofﬁce. • • • if you’re involved in public relations or advertising for nonproﬁt organizations or

political campaigns. • • • if you’ve taken an interest in the activities of a public interest organization or a polit-

ical campaign as a reporter, news producer, consultant, or student. • • • or if you simply want to understand better what direct mail fundraising is all about.

Revolution in the

Mailbox

Revolution in the

Mailbox Your Guide to Successful Direct Mail Fundraising

MAL

WARWICK

Copyright © 2004 by Mal Warwick. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741

www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, e-mail: [email protected]. Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3993, or fax 317-572-4002. Jossey-Bass also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Readers should be aware that Internet Websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Warwick, Mal. Revolution in the mailbox : your guide to successful direct mail fundraising / Mal Warwick.— 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7879-6429-8 (alk. paper) 1. Direct-mail fund raising. I. Title. HV41.2.W3788 2004 658.15'224—dc22 2003025427 Printed in the United States of America FIRST EDITION

HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Tables, Figures, and Exhibits

xi

Preface

xv

Acknowledgments

xxi

About the Author

xxv

Introduction: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

1

PART ONE

Making Direct Mail Work for Your Organization

9

1 The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

11

2 Selecting Your Audience

35

3 Preparing Your Test Mailing

53

4 Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package

69

5 Premiums and Other Involvement Devices

81

6 Building Your Donor Base

87

PART TWO

Getting the Most from Your Donors

103

7 Maximizing Donor Value

105

8 Annual Giving and Membership Programs

125

9 Monthly Giving

139

10 High-Dollar Annual Giving Clubs

153

11 The Many Uses of the Telephone

163

ix

x

Contents

12 Legacy Giving

173

13 Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

183

PART THREE

Direct Mail Fundraising Today and Tomorrow

207

14 Mastering the New Media Mix

209

15 Twelve Trends for a New Century

223

PART FOUR

Four Years in the Life of a Successful Direct Mail Program 16 The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

245 247

Resource A: Glossary

273

Resource B: Working with a Direct Mail Consultant

283

Resource C: Answering the Arguments Against Direct Mail

293

Resource D: Fundraising Ratios and Other Deceptions

299

Resource E: Direct Mail Fundraising in the Thirteenth Century?

305

Resource F: Reading List and On-Line Resources

309

References

317

Index

319

I Want to Hear from You!

325

Tables, Figures, and Exhibits

Tables 1.1 Donor Acquisition Versus Donor Resolicitation Mailings

18

1.2 Mailing Quantities in a Typical First-Year Program

19

1.3 Overall Plan for a Representative Renewal Series

20

1.4 Simpliﬁed Annual Mailing Schedule for a Three-Track Direct Mail Fundraising Program

20

1.5 Simpliﬁed Annual Direct Mail Segmentation Plan

21

2.1 Simpliﬁed Representation of a Small Merge-Purge

47

3.1 Factors That Make Mailings Work—or Fail

55

3.2 Timeline for an Acquisition Test Mailing

63

6.1 List Selection Model for a Hypothetical 150,000-Piece Rollout Mailing

90

6.2 Growth of a Hypothetical Donor File in Year 1

93

6.3 Growth of a Hypothetical Donor File in Year 2

93

6.4 Growth of a Hypothetical Donor File in Year 3

94

6.5 Five Years, Two Contrasting Direct Mail Strategies

97

7.1 Calculating Long-Term Value, Method 2

108

7.2 Calculating Long-Term Value, Method 3

110

7.3 Cutting Costs Can Be a Losing Proposition

117

8.1 Hypothetical Mailing Schedules for Four Strategies to Give Donors Opportunities to Make Repeat Gifts

127

xi

xii

Tables, Figures, and Exhibits

8.2 Schedule for a Hypothetical Five-Effort Renewal Series

128

9.1 Long-Term Income from 200 New Monthly Donors

144

9.2 Long-Term Income from 200 New Multi-Donors

146

10.1 Typical Beneﬁts for a High-Dollar Annual Giving Club

159

10.2 Giving Levels in a Typical High-Dollar Annual Giving Club

160

13.1 Donor Acknowledgment Levels in a Hypothetical Fundraising Program

188

13.2 Examples of Cultivation Mailings

197

13.3 Two Approaches to Direct Mail Fundraising

203

14.1 Three-Year Monthly Schedule for a Representative Fundraising Program

212

14.2 How the Techniques of Direct Response Fundraising Are Changing

220

16.1 Four-Year Summary of UCS Direct Mail Fundraising Results

249

16.2 UCS Membership Development Program, 1999

258

16.3 UCS Membership Development Program, 2000

262

16.4 UCS Membership Development Program, 2001

268

16.5 UCS Membership Development Program, 2002

269

Figures 2.1 Schematic Representation of Donors’ Overlapping Interests

43

2.2 Three-Dimensional Representation of a Simple List Segmentation Plan

49

7.1 Donor Attrition over Ten Years in a Hypothetical Direct Mail Fundraising Program 13.1 The Donor Loyalty Cycle

115 184

Exhibits 2.1 List Broker’s Data Card for a Direct Mail Fundraising List

38

2.2 List of Lists for an Acquisition Test Mailing

40

xiii

Tables, Figures, and Exhibits

2.3 List of Lists for an Acquisition Rollout Mailing

41

2.4 Merge-Purge Summary Report

46

2.5 Flashcount for a Special Appeal Mailing (page 1 of 10 pages)

50

3.1 Budget for a Typical 50,000-Piece Initial Test Mailing

61

4.1 Outer Envelopes from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages

71

4.2 Postage Options Used in Direct Mail Fundraising

72

4.3 Response Devices from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages

74

4.4 Reply Envelopes from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages

75

4.5 Brochures from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages

77

4.6 Front-End Premiums from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages

78

4.7 Other Enclosures from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages

79

8.1 Key Elements of a Five-Effort Annual Renewal Series

130

8.2 Membership Beneﬁts Shown on a Direct Mail Fundraising Package Response Device

135

9.1 Response Device from a Monthly Giving Program Invitation

141

9.2 Letter from a Monthly Giving Program Invitation

150

10.1 Sample High-Dollar Invitation Package

155

11.1 Telephone Pledge Package

170

12.1 Insert from a Legacy Society Promotion Mailing

177

12.2 One Page from the “Legacy of Hope” Newsletter

178

12.3 Bequest Promotion Letter

181

13.1 Personalized New-Gift Thank-You Letter

187

13.2 The Donor Bill of Rights

191

13.3 New-Member Welcome Package Letter

192

13.4 Letter from a Cultivation Mailing

198

16.1 UCS Direct Mail Membership Acquisition Package

251

16.2 UCS High-Dollar Giving Club Special Appeal

259

16.3 UCS Year-End Appeal

264

16.4 UCS Monthly Giving Program Conversion and Upgrade

270

Preface

I

n the years following World War II, the Easter Seal Society and a few other big American charities began making extensive use of the mails to meet their increasingly ambitious fundraising goals. With little cash outlay, they mailed millions of inexpensive fundraising letters and consistently reaped huge proﬁts. So successful were these early mass-mail fundraising efforts that some charities simply banked the proceeds without bothering to record the contributors’ names and addresses. It was cheaper to send out virtually the same appeal again the next year to the same millions of addresses. That was more than half a century ago. A great deal has happened since: a more than twenty-fold increase in charitable contributions, the advent of ZIP codes, fundraising scandals featured on network news, extraordinarily powerful personal computers, 1,000 percent inﬂation in nonproﬁt postal rates, and a similarly huge rise in printing costs—and, above all, competition in the form of appeals mailed by thousands upon thousands of nonproﬁt causes and institutions both large and small. In 2002, the U.S. Postal Service distributed more than 14 billion pieces of mail for nonproﬁt organizations—most of them appeals for funds. (Those 14 billion letters constituted approximately 16 percent of all the bulk mail delivered in the United States that year, or nearly one out of every six pieces of bulk mail. Nonproﬁts account for about 7 percent of all U.S. mail, which totaled almost 203 billion pieces in 2002, according to the postal service.) But this isn’t simply a matter of volume. Direct mail fundraising accounts for a major share of the ﬁnancial support given many of our country’s biggest charities, and it has come to loom large on the political landscape as well. This proliferation of mail has created a challenge for nonproﬁt organizations to make proﬁts through direct mail. To help meet this challenge, hundreds of consulting ﬁrms have come into existence, offering a staggering variety of approaches and levels of skill. Now, more than ﬁfty years into its history, direct mail fundraising

xv

xvi

Preface

has gotten complicated. The pages ahead are my attempt to explain some of the complications. I wrote this book in response to years of seeing desperate and bewildered looks on the faces of clients, employees, and friends. Those looks were often justiﬁed. Not only do some in the industry go out of their way to mystify the process but direct mail fundraising can be confusing. In fact, it sometimes seems downright illogical. I hope the following pages help demystify this crazy business and cast a little light on some of its counterintuitive aspects. Although excellent books have been written about direct mail, and even about direct mail fundraising in particular, all but a few (noted in Resource F) are either highly technical discussions laden with statistical formulas and bearing a disturbing resemblance to college textbooks or are much more superﬁcial treatments chock full of tips about writing good fundraising letters. This book is neither. It presents a point of view that I might as well state clearly at the outset: Successful direct mail fundraising has little to do with statistics or with letter writing. It’s a long-term process that requires intelligent planning and careful, consistent management. To succeed in direct mail fundraising over the long term, it’s essential to distinguish between strategy and tactics. As in any other ﬁeld, you can win the battle and lose the war. In this book, I hope to help illuminate the difference. In military usage, the distinction between a nation’s strategy and its tactics is straightforward: • Strategy is the manner in which a nation seeks to ensure its security in peacetime as well as war, employing large-scale planning and development to make the best possible use of all its resources. • Tactics are the choices made concerning the use and deployment of military forces in actual combat. Because few appreciate this bold distinction, the word strategy is often confused with tactics. In this discussion, I mean to draw the line just as sharply as do the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The strategy employed by a nonproﬁt organization includes decisions about its leadership and policy priorities, as well as resource development—not a plan but a vision. To set strategy is not to engage in “long-term planning” to determine how existing resources may be put to the best possible use. Setting strategy means dreaming about what you want your organization to accomplish. How to marshal the resources to reach that goal is an operational question—a matter of tactics. Those tactics may include a direct mail fundraising program designed to help get you where you want to go, just as they may also include lobbying, employing public relations tactics, establishing fees for services, or merchandising.

xvii

Preface

I’m uncomfortable with this bellicose metaphor, however. I’d prefer to describe direct mail fundraising in terms of streams and rivers or seeds that grow into trees, which cluster into groves and then over time become forests. Strategy and tactics smack of the nasty things I’ve spent many of my waking hours helping our clients stop. But I know of no other terms that help to draw so clear a distinction between decisions that are really important and those that aren’t.

••• I wrote the original edition of this book in 1989. In the decade and a half that has passed since then, direct mail fundraising has done a lot of growing up. And so have I. Like my colleagues throughout the world, I’ve learned a great deal about my craft. I’ve also seen the ﬁeld grow steadily more complex, sophisticated, and demanding. This new, revised edition of Revolution in the Mailbox reﬂects the more mature perspective that has evolved in the ﬁeld. The chief elements of that new perspective include the following: • A deeper understanding of the many specialized ways that direct mail may be used to advance the fundraising process—by promoting monthly giving and legacy giving, for example • An appreciation of the interdependence of direct mail and other fundraising subspecialties—major gifts and legacy giving, in particular • Heightened awareness of the value of building strong relationships with donors, as opposed to maximizing short-term revenue • An emerging perception that the value of direct mail fundraising can be increased through coordination with telephone, on-line, and other communications efforts That new perspective informed the writing of this largely new book. I have retained (though revised and updated) six chapters from the original edition. But ten of the sixteen chapters included here are entirely new. In the examples I cite, I refer consistently to public interest groups. I mean that term to include nonproﬁt institutions and charities that provide direct services (including hospitals, colleges, and universities), as well as nonproﬁt organizations dedicated to social change through lobbying, organizing, or other means. Much of my professional experience has been with public interest groups or candidates advocating changes in public policy, as many of the illustrations will make abundantly clear. Over the years, my colleagues and I have worked with hundreds of nonproﬁt organizations, including environmental, civil rights, social justice, women’s and consumers’ rights, and other advocacy organizations.

xviii

Preface

However, we’ve also worked with a great many nonproﬁts dedicated to cultural, educational, and charitable goals, including universities and colleges, hospitals, and museums. After more than two decades, I feel conﬁdent saying that much the same techniques work well for just about any type of nonproﬁt. In general, obvious differences notwithstanding, what works well for a consumer group is likely to do the trick for a university, museum, or hospital. Moreover, although a political campaign may use the principles of direct mail in ways that are different from those common in the nonproﬁt world, they’re the same principles, too. Many of the techniques of direct mail fundraising are also broadly transferable across national borders. In recent years, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time teaching fundraising outside the United States. Judging from what I’ve learned about direct mail fundraising in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Scandinavia, Argentina, and a host of other countries, the same fundamental approach works in a very wide range of circumstances.

••• This book won’t show you how to write, design, and mail an appeal for funds. Nor will it tell you how to think or plan or manage your organization. It will help you understand what direct mail can do for you and how you can best make it work. Its purpose is to explain and illustrate direct mail fundraising in context, as the means by which many nonproﬁt organizations have grown, increased their inﬂuence, and ensured their long-term ﬁnancial stability. This book consists of four parts. Part One, “Making Direct Mail Work for Your Organization,” covers the fundamentals of direct mail fundraising in six chapters. At the outset, in Chapter One, I explain how you can use direct mail to pursue your strategic goals. I give you a sense of what you can expect from direct mail and whether it may—or may not—be right for your organization. In the next four chapters, I discuss mailing lists and the preparation of an initial test mailing, detail the anatomy of a direct mail fundraising package, and explain the pros and cons of premiums and other involvement devices. Chapter Six, which closes this section, describes the strategic choices you will face following a successful initial test mailing, giving you a hint of years of hard work to come. Part Two, “Getting the Most from Your Donors,” is an in-depth journey through the challenges and opportunities you’ll encounter as you build your direct mail fundraising program. Chapter Seven explains the concept of “Maximizing Donor Value” and lays out the basic principles you’ll need to follow to maximize that value. The following ﬁve chapters tackle the most broadly useful techniques you might use to build donor value over the years: annual giving or membership programs, monthly giving, high-dollar annual giving clubs, telephone fundraising,

xix

Preface

and legacy giving programs. Chapter Thirteen wraps up Part Two with an in-depth discussion of donor acknowledgment and cultivation—the stuff of “relationship fundraising.” Part Three, “Direct Mail Fundraising Today and Tomorrow,” includes two chapters. Chapter Fourteen deals with the state of the art today, examining multichannel communications and “integrated fundraising.” Chapter Fifteen rounds out Part Three with a look at twelve trends that promise to affect the nonproﬁt sector and the practice of direct mail fundraising for many years to come. In Part Four, “Four Years in the Life of a Successful Direct Mail Program,” I present in some depth the ﬁrst four years of the work my colleagues and I have done in collaboration with one of our clients—the Union of Concerned Scientists. You’ll ﬁnd statistical reports as well as sample packages there. A Resources section completes the book. Included are a glossary of the direct mail fundraising terms used in this book, some thoughts on working with a direct mail fundraising consultant, a few ideas about how to respond to the arguments you will inevitably hear used against direct mail, a discussion about the concept of the “fundraising ratio,” two early historical examples of direct mail fundraising, and, ﬁnally, a list of print and on-line resources to delve further into the strange world of direct mail fundraising.

••• Chances are, direct mail is one of the most effective tools your organization can use to build your base in the century ahead. But you can do so only by using a creative, no-holds-barred, entrepreneurial approach to direct mail, making use of the newest insights and the latest technologies to gain maximum advantage for your organization. I look on direct mail fundraising as a business, and you should, too; it’s an entrepreneurial tool that can be used in a great many ways, for good or ill. Viewed narrowly as letter writing or an occasional fund appeal, direct mail is unlikely to serve you well as the twenty-ﬁrst century unfolds. But if you can make it serve the needs of your overall fundraising plan, it can help lay the foundation for your organization’s continuing success for many decades to come. Not all the terms used in this book or the methods described are universally accepted among direct mail fundraisers. My colleagues and I in Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc. (Berkeley, California) cherish a view of ourselves as creative, and we’ve actually won awards and a lot of public attention in support of that view. Even though all of us in the business follow the same basic rules, and it’s standard practice to copy successful techniques from one another, the particular approach to direct mail fundraising laid out in these pages is based on our own experience.

xx

Preface

Much the same goes for my references to telephone fundraising. I’m also involved in that industry, as a cofounder of Share Group, Inc. (Somerville, Massachusetts). The language I use and the examples I cite relating to telephone fundraising are from the experience I’ve gained through Share. I am also founder and chairman of Response Management Technologies, Inc. (Berkeley, California), which processes gifts and provides “list maintenance” and data-processing services to many nonproﬁt organizations. Doubtless, my connection to Response Management not only gives me a deeper understanding of the issues involving “back-end” services (discussed in Chapter Seven) but helps account for my bias favoring specialized service bureaus over in-house donor management programs. To learn from people with biases different from mine and for a fuller understanding of direct marketing in general and direct mail fundraising in particular, I suggest the books, periodicals, and on-line resources cited in Resource F. Some of the examples cited here are obviously hypothetical; others are real. Every real-life case study described is derived from the experience of Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc., and so are virtually all of the direct mail packages pictured in the illustrations. Wherever I refer to “us” or “we,” that’s who I mean. To avoid distractions and make the subject of direct mail fundraising as accessible as possible, I’ve chosen not to use footnotes either to note parenthetical points or to cite references for facts or quotes. My graduate school instructors may be very disappointed, but I operate under the assumption that if something’s important enough to include in a book, it ought to be in the text, not in a footnote. However, to appease my editor, I’ve appended a brief References section to cite the sources I’ve used at key points. Some of what follows may not be popular in the fundraising community. So be it. My reason for getting into this business in the ﬁrst place was to change the world. A lot has happened in the twenty-four years since I stopped licking stamps and bought my ﬁrst computer. As a group, direct mail fundraising consultants have played a major role in many of those events. We’ve helped nonproﬁt organizations meet urgent human needs, shape public opinion, and expand the boundaries of our culture. Direct mail has had a profound impact on American politics and society. But I think the world still needs changing. Berkeley, California November 2003

Mal Warwick

Acknowledgments

I

t’s all Ron Dellums’s fault. I got into the direct mail business nearly twentyﬁve years ago to help Congressman Ron Dellums launch a nationwide fundraising campaign. His 1980 reelection race was expected to be difﬁcult. It wasn’t. He won hands down that year, and so did I. Dellums went on to serve a total of fourteen terms, retiring in 1998, having chaired the House Armed Services Committee, the House District of Columbia Committee, and the Congressional Black Caucus. Because he had insisted I personally supervise the direct mail consultants we’d hired, I got a taste of direct mail fundraising at its very best—and I was hooked for life. Since those exhilarating days in the fall of 1979, when I was often forced to stay up until the early hours of the morning to count all the checks rolling into the Dellums campaign, I’ve worked with hundreds of nonproﬁt organizations and political committees. My coworkers and I have mailed uncounted millions of letters and raised hundreds of millions of dollars to promote the public interest. In the process, I’ve come to know hundreds of supremely talented individuals who have committed years of their lives to make the world a better place—a list of people far too long to reproduce here. They, my clients, ultimately deserve any credit I may get for writing this book. I’ve learned far more from them than they have from me. Several of my friends in the public interest community read the manuscript of this book at various stages in its development and offered helpful criticism, sometimes lengthy and detailed. I took all their advice seriously and made many changes they suggested, but not all. In preparing this revised and updated edition, I beneﬁted particularly from timely and helpful comments by the following people: • Ken Burnett and Harvey McKinnon, two of this planet’s most accomplished direct mail fundraisers, read drafts of key chapters and delivered their comments in record time.

xxi

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Acknowledgments

• My friend and colleague Joseph H. White Jr., whose knowledge about telephone fundraising is unsurpassed, did the same. • My friends at the Social Venture Network, coexecutive directors Deborah Nelson and Pamela Chaloult, were particularly helpful in reviewing my draft copy about socially responsible business. • Alisa Gravitz, executive director of Co-op America, helped steer me through the statistical thicket that surrounds socially responsible investing (SRI). • I am very deeply indebted to my friends at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), who graciously consented to permit me to include extensive information about their direct mail fundraising program in this book. Three UCS staff members also contributed extremely helpful comments: Howard (“Bud”) Ris, David Whalen, and Emily Ferman. I’m also in debt to my many friends and colleagues in Mal Warwick & Associates and our afﬁliated companies. They’re an extraordinarily gifted and dedicated bunch of people, and I am privileged to work by their side. For their assistance on this book, they deserve triple credit. Not only did they teach me most of what I know about lists, production, statistical analysis, design, and copywriting, they also stoically covered for me over six months when I stole away from the ofﬁce to write. Moreover, many individual employees of Mal Warwick & Associates helped me in major ways in writing this book. Some deserve special mention here. Without the help of Stephen Hitchcock, president of Mal Warwick & Associates, I could not have written Revolution in the Mailbox. His continuing encouragement and support, his awesome managerial ability, and critical editorial eye came to the rescue on more occasions than I can possibly recall. Steve’s comments on two early drafts of the manuscript and on later drafts of several chapters in particular helped steer me away from dire embarrassment. The wisdom Steve has gained in more than twenty-ﬁve years as a professional fundraiser has found its way into nearly every chapter of this book. I’ve borrowed liberally from him, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. I also owe a great deal to Gwen Chapman, senior vice president of Mal Warwick & Associates. Gwen’s two decades of fundraising experience on three continents and her extraordinary command of the principles of relationship fundraising profoundly inﬂuenced what I’ve written about monthly giving and about the central role of donor care in building strong relationships with donors. In preparing this revised and updated edition, many others at Mal Warwick & Associates helped in signiﬁcant ways, particularly in identifying and preparing the entirely new illustrations featured in these pages. Bill Rehm and Mwosi Swenson bore the brunt of my demands, but others also contributed in signiﬁcant ways— Dan Weeks, Susie Fought, and Patricia Quintana Bidar, in particular.

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Acknowledgments

In the ﬁnal stages of this project, two people’s contributions stood out. My editor at Jossey-Bass, Johanna Vondeling, helped enormously. Her sagacious review of the original text and of my proposed additions and changes helped make sense of what was threatening to become a garbled and unreadable book. Johanna’s assistant, Allison Brunner, was also extremely helpful, especially in culling through an unruly mess of proposed illustrations. For all the many important contributions that others have made to this book, none of them bears any responsibility for its contents. I’ve borrowed a great many ideas, but the words and images on these pages were all mine except where I’ve indicated otherwise. Now they’re yours, too—and welcome to them! —M. W.

About the Author

C

onsultant, author, and public speaker Mal Warwick has been involved in the not-for-proﬁt sector for four decades. He is the founder and chairman of Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc. (Berkeley, California)—a fundraising and marketing agency that has served nonproﬁt organizations since 1979, and of its sister company, Response Management Technologies, Inc., a data-processing ﬁrm for nonproﬁt organizations. He is also cofounder (with Nick Allen) of Donordigital.com LLC (San Francisco), which assists nonproﬁt organizations on-line, and is a cofounder of Share Group, Inc. (Somerville, Massachusetts), the nation’s leading telephone fundraising ﬁrm. Warwick has written or edited ﬁfteen books of interest to nonproﬁt managers, including The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success (2000), Fundraising on the Internet, coedited with Hart and Allen (2002), and the best-selling text, How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters (2001). He is editor of Mal Warwick’s Newsletter: Successful Direct Mail, Telephone & Online Fundraising, and is a popular speaker and workshop leader throughout the world. Among the hundreds of nonproﬁts Warwick and his colleagues have served over the years are many of the nation’s largest and most distinguished charities, as well as six Democratic presidential candidates and scores of small local and regional organizations. Collectively, Warwick and his associates are responsible for raising at least half a billion dollars, largely in the form of small gifts from individuals. Warwick is an active member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (Alexandria, Virginia), a member of the board of the Resource Alliance (London), organizers of the annual International Fundraising Congress, and its USA Country Representative; he also served for ten years on the board of the Association of Direct Response Fundraising Counsel (Washington, D.C.), two of those years as president. For more than a decade, the author has been active in promoting social and environmental responsibility in the business community. He was a cofounder of

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Introduction How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

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irect mail has already left its imprint on the pages of history. But direct mail fundraising, as it was conducted in its infancy following World War II, bears little resemblance to the intensely competitive and complex industry it has become in recent years. Like other technology-driven industries, direct mail fundraising has experienced accelerating change as one innovation after another multiplied the possibilities in what has often seemed a geometric progression. Yet even so, the changes wrought on American society by our work as direct mail fundraisers dwarf the changes imposed on the practice of our craft. Beginning four decades ago, a handful of visionary direct mail specialists, largely unknown to the general public, began successfully applying the techniques of direct response marketing to the challenge of creating social change. Like “The Hidden Persuaders” of the advertising world, who were unmasked in a popular book of social commentary at the time, their inﬂuence on society far outstripped their reputations. Since the introduction of the ZIP code in the 1960s, their innovations have dramatically changed the American political system. Writing in the April 1989 issue of Fund Raising Management, Roger Craver, one of those pioneers in direct mail fundraising, contends that “the climate of frustration and alienation of the late 1960s and early 1970s was particularly suited for direct mail.” Craver writes, It all seemed to happen at once, one of those accidents of history when a given technology proves so unusually suited for its times that it goes beyond merely

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ﬁlling a need . . . and begins to effect actual societal change. [In 1969], Richard Viguerie had just launched his pioneering efforts to build the mailing lists and devise the techniques that would give voice to the new conservatives. Morris Dees, a young Alabama lawyer and commercial direct-mail entrepreneur, was plotting the then unconventional use of direct mail to help the anti-war presidential candidate George McGovern. And my partners and I were testing the unheard of concept of recruiting hundreds of thousands of small gift contributors as members of the “citizens lobby” that became Common Cause. These early experiments in political direct mail fundraising paid off quickly and dramatically. Craver continues: The political pundits laughed, but they didn’t laugh long. Within two years, George McGovern had amassed more than 350,000 donors—giving him enough ﬁnancial support to bypass the Democratic bosses, go directly to rankand-ﬁle Democrats and secure his party’s nomination for the presidency. Common Cause reached the 250,000-member mark and succeeded in its lobbying efforts to end both the outmoded seniority system and the process of secret votes in Congress. And Viguerie stunned conventional politicians with his capacity to raise millions of dollars for conservative candidates. The revolution led by Craver, Viguerie, Dees, Tom Mathews, Peter Tagger, and others has left an indelible imprint on American society. Popular but unconventional candidates without access to established funding sources have used direct mail to ﬁnance some of the most pivotal political campaigns in recent American history. Among them were George Wallace in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980, John Anderson in 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, and Jesse Jackson in 1988—the candidates and the campaigns that have changed their parties’ politics for many years to come. Against the odds, both conservatives and progressives have gained footholds at all levels of government because of funds raised by mail. Through direct mail, private citizens by the millions have become personally— sometimes intensely—involved in national politics. Millions have become donors to the Republican and Democratic parties and have helped shape their agendas by the sheer force of their numbers. The contributions of check-writing activists have also sustained campaigns for a great many candidates for the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives, governorships, and other public ofﬁces. Direct mail has accelerated the country’s political realignment as a strategic tool in the hands of leaders of the New Politics, especially on the Right. Membershipbased, nonparty political committees—both political action committees (PACs)

Introduction: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

and single-issue advocacy groups—have become ﬁxtures on the political landscape. Election after election, they selectively direct their resources toward compatible candidates, helping to shape the future destinies of their parties—and of the country. But politics is more than candidates and political parties, and the impact of direct mail fundraising extends beyond the boundaries of the formal political process, as Craver points out in his Fund Raising Management article: Had it done nothing more than contribute to the breaking up of the concentrated, centralized power of the political parties—enabling more unconventional candidates to have their day in the sun—direct mail would have made a signiﬁcant contribution to American political history. But perhaps even more signiﬁcant has been its contribution to the building of a massive political force in this country—the citizen action organization. Direct mail fundraising has given birth to some of this nation’s most innovative and effective nongovernmental institutions and given new life to many others. Direct-mail-based public interest organizations have successfully pushed for legal and political reform, protection of the environment and of animal life, safeguards for civil liberties and women’s rights, and support for human rights both at home and abroad. Groups on the other end of the political spectrum, similarly spawned by direct mail, have also had great impact by shrinking the reproductive health choices available to women against the tide of public opinion, blocking the gun control desired by a majority of Americans, and ending the political careers of many leading liberals. In an age of increasing distrust for politics and policymakers and of continually decreasing voter participation, direct mail fundraising has provided many Americans with a simple and effective channel for political expression. Sending a political contribution via direct mail is not a substitute for voting, of course. In fact, the overwhelming majority of political direct mail donors are also voters for whom direct mail affords extra opportunities for political participation. Direct mail has come to play so large a role for a number of reasons, including the following: • It’s an important source of information. Unlike much of what passes for political communication through television, radio, or other media, messages delivered by mail are typically packed with information. Information, in its truest sense, is that which is new and surprising, and direct mail is full of surprises. Only outspoken candidates or nonproﬁt organizations with clear messages can successfully raise signiﬁcant amounts of money by mail. Direct mail doesn’t work well unless it’s based on ideas. Double-talk, compromise, and obfuscation don’t sell; only clarity works.

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• It’s involving. Direct mail fundraising targets the best prospects through careful list selection and sophisticated data-processing techniques, so it reaches individuals with messages they’re likely to be interested in receiving. And, by deﬁnition, direct mail asks for action. In the article I’ve cited, Craver calls direct mail “the best antidote ever invented for political alienation.” In a much more focused way than voting, contributing by mail provides a ready-made means to “do something” about today’s headlines. As Craver writes, “Direct mail—with its small checks, its surveys, its angry postcards to the politicians—provides genuine recourse, along with a safety valve for steaming political emotions.” • It’s inexpensive. Compared to television or newspaper advertising or to most any other form of mass communication, direct mail can be an economical way to get a message across. This is true simply because, properly managed, direct mail can make money, possibly lots of it. At the same time, the price paid by individual donors is small. Nearly everyone with a mailbox can afford an occasional $15 or $25 contribution to make a political statement. Millions take advantage of this bargain. The bargain reached between donor and organization thus results in a great return on investment for both. Meanwhile, as political direct mail was changing the character of American democracy, similar revolutionary techniques were working their way into the world of fundraising for nonproﬁt organizations.

New Frontiers in Charitable Fundraising During the 1960s and 1970s, as Roger Craver, Richard Viguerie, and other direct mail pioneers were launching their early efforts to crash the gates of the political world, others were applying some of their own new direct mail techniques to broaden the base of charitable and religious causes. Large charities that had raised money by mail for two decades were learning from the experience, reﬁning old techniques, and trying new ones. They were joined by a growing number of newcomers. Meanwhile, a boom in commercial direct response marketing was starting, making available to fundraisers a fast-growing body of tested marketing methods. Through the combined inﬂuence of all these new players and the accumulated impact of new technology and economic trends, direct mail fundraising has changed profoundly since the 1960s. Among the many changes are these: • The advent of the ZIP code. ZIP codes weren’t in widespread use until the early 1970s, although they’d been introduced a decade earlier. The ZIP code made computerization practical. (Just imagine sorting a quarter-million-name statewide list on 3×5 cards into alphabetical order!)

Introduction: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

• Computerization. These days, we take computers for granted in direct mail fundraising, just as we do in our daily lives. In every aspect of our craft, from maintaining lists and printing names and addresses to managing, analyzing, and even copywriting and designing, our work today would be impossible without computers. Direct mail fundraising is an information-based activity. It’s been many years since the 3×5 card and the Addressograph were up to the task of managing the information our business requires. • Donor ﬁle segmentation. In the 1970s, with computers becoming more widely available, fundraisers began learning the value of storing and using extensive giving histories for individual donors. Speedy and precise data processing made it possible for direct mail fundraisers to slice and dice their lists of donors and prospects into ever-smaller pieces. Today, mailings may consist of more than one hundred segments or “cells,” individually identiﬁed so as to measure differences in response and engineer cost savings in future mailings. Just forty years ago, many nonproﬁts commonly mailed the same resolicitation package to everyone on their donor ﬁles. Today, the rule is to classify donors in terms of “recency, frequency, and monetary amount” and to mail many different packages simultaneously to different segments of the same list, as I’ve described in detail in this book. With this technique, direct mail fundraisers have dramatically increased the net income from nonproﬁt donor lists. • The birth of relationship fundraising. By recognizing donors’ varying levels and types of interest, we’ve also made vast improvements in communications between donors and the organizations they support. Many nonproﬁts have derived large, added dividends from their direct mail programs by contributing to the strategically important process of cultivating prospective donors of bequests and other major gifts. • Personalization. Before the advent of the computer and computer-driven printers, direct mail fundraisers almost invariably addressed prospects, even their donors, in the impersonal idiom of the “Dear Friend” letter. Personalization enables fundraisers to include in their appeals not only donors’ titles, names, and addresses but anything else a computer may keep on ﬁle about them, from facts embedded in a giving history to personal preferences. Once very expensive, personalization has become cost-effective in many applications and is now sometimes used, even in donor acquisition programs. Although it is normally driven by computer formulas that deﬁne classes and categories of donors, personalization allows direct mail fundraisers to come surprisingly close to genuinely personal, one-to-one communications, and it’s getting better every year. • Merge-purge. This basic tool of direct mail donor acquisition was not introduced until 1968. This sophisticated computer process efﬁciently reduces duplicate appeals and allows mailers to eliminate previous donors from their prospect

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mailings. Without merge-purge, the multi-million-piece prospect mailings of the past three decades might easily have provoked much more intense and widespread anger than they have. In addition, merge-purge has helped keep the lid on the rising cost of prospecting. Today, the merge-purge process brings invaluable information to light about the overlap and relationships among mailing lists, so it helps fundraisers target prospective contributors with ever-greater precision. The results are reduced costs, higher response rates, and less frequent donor complaints. • Testing. The conceptual backbone of today’s direct mail fundraising was anathema to most fundraisers forty years ago. On those infrequent occasions when it was proposed, testing was typically rejected out of hand as undigniﬁed or unnecessarily expensive. The prevailing assumption was that any competent nonproﬁt manager knew far better than his donors how to promote his own organization. By now, however, most fundraisers have awakened to the reality that donors make their own decisions. Fundraisers’ guesses and preconceptions must be tested in the marketplace. • Growing competition. One of the leading charitable fundraising specialists in 1969 was Jerry Huntsinger. Writing in the retrospective twentieth anniversary issue of Fund Raising Management (April 1989), Huntsinger contends that increasingly poor response made it unrealistic for most charities to mail ten million or more prospect packages annually. A great many had done so in what he termed the “golden age” of direct mail prospecting in the 1970s and 1980s, but that was becoming less common with every passing year (and has continued to decline). In fact, Huntsinger claims, “Some organizations were shocked to discover they could no longer mail enough pieces to prospective donors to even keep up with the inevitable attrition on their house ﬁle!” In other words, some charities were discovering the harsh reality of free market economics: they’d built huge donor ﬁles on the cheap in a wide-open market, but increasing competition was preventing them from maintaining their “market share.” Huntsinger attributed the problem, in part, to the public’s “loss of faith in the integrity of nonproﬁts.” I think that’s nonsense. Similar statements surface at fundraising conferences year after year, in the face of unabated generosity by the donor public. But I agree that very few causes and candidates can succeed with the old mass-mailing techniques. I can’t recall a time during the past quarter-century that my colleagues ever sent what could reasonably be termed a mass mailing. These days, selective targeting, not mass marketing, is the key to successful direct mail fundraising for most public interest groups. • Inﬂation. In 1969, the typical cost of mailing one thousand prospect packages was about $85, including list rental, production, and nonproﬁt postage, which was then $18 per thousand, or less than 2 cents per piece. The returns were usually $125 to $175 per thousand, turning a nice proﬁt. During the past forty-some

Introduction: How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

years, however, production and mailing costs (most notably, postage) have risen 400 to 500 percent, and because of growing competition returns have not kept pace. The average charitable gift has risen, and well-run solicitation programs have continued to yield handsome proﬁts, but donor acquisition efforts are generally far less cost-effective than they were forty years ago. • Changes in the postal system. In the Reagan era, growing postal deﬁcits and pressures for privatization led to big changes in the way the U.S. Postal Service charged for and processed mail. Extensive automation by the postal service forced mailers to conform to new standards of “list hygiene” (ensuring the accuracy and timeliness of information on their lists) and in the design and handling of mailing packages. The procedures imposed by the new national change of address system (NCOA) and certiﬁcation procedures (permitting mailers to barcode, sort, and bundle mail in the prescribed manner) added new burdens to nonproﬁts, requiring greater sophistication and professionalism in the design and handling of their mail. • The spread of telephone fundraising. Commercial telemarketing has its roots in telephone sales efforts ﬁrst undertaken many decades ago, but the systematic use of telephone technology to raise money for public interest organizations is a phenomenon of the 1980s. Few current telephone fundraising ﬁrms were in existence before 1980. Their success in obtaining sometimes spectacular results has persuaded most nonproﬁt organizations to use telephone fundraising techniques in a wide range of applications, despite resistance from many donors (and many of their trustees). Today, telephone fundraising is an integral part of every successful, large-scale direct mail fundraising program.

New Standards of Success As a result of these factors, the standards of success have changed in direct mail fundraising. Gone are the days when you wouldn’t use a mailing list that didn’t promise to break even. As Huntsinger notes, “Now, there is a new word on the street: ‘Investment.’ . . . [Today] many charities are pleased if they can enroll a new donor for an investment of $5 to $10.” In fact, now, some ﬁfteen years after Huntsinger wrote, some nonproﬁts are content to invest $25, $50, or more to recruit a new donor because their donor resolicitation programs are so very profitable, as I explain in this book. The standard of success in direct mail fundraising is no longer a single number expressed in dollars and cents. Like the U.S. private sector, which is waking up to the fact that obsession with short-term proﬁts can undermine a company’s long-term ﬁnancial health, the independent sector today is looking on direct mail fundraising from a longer perspective. The ultimate standard of success in direct mail is the extent to which it helps an organization achieve its strategic goals. Viewed most broadly today, direct mail

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fundraising is much more than a source of funds. It can help raise an organization’s proﬁle, broaden its public support, provide a means for its donors to involve themselves in its affairs, and furnish an extra measure of stability in a time of change. You’ll note that I didn’t include the use of e-mail and the Internet in the list of changes in fundraising since the 1960s. That’s not an oversight. As I write this book, the World Wide Web is barely ten years old. In many respects, our lives and our work have changed as a result, but the impact on fundraising has been minimal so far. In spite of occasionally spectacular successes, on-line fundraising has brought generally meager returns, far below those envisioned by its champions in the 1990s. E-mail and Web sites are emerging as useful adjuncts to direct mail and telemarketing in many fundraising programs, but their long-term impact, however promising, has yet to be widely felt. Long before the advent of the World Wide Web and before the profound changes cited earlier seized hold of the direct mail fundraising ﬁeld, the world somehow managed to get along without microcomputers, ZIP codes, or laser printers, much less the Internet. The challenge for charitable fundraisers then was to print, address, and mail the largest possible number of letters at the lowest possible cost. Our challenge now is more complex: to make use of a greatly broadened array of fundraising tools to minimize acquisition costs and maximize the longterm value of our donors. Today, we must think of direct mail not as a compartmentalized effort but in the context of a fundraising and communications program that may use many channels.

PART ONE

Making Direct Mail Work for Your Organization

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he ﬁrst six chapters of this book encompass the fundamentals of direct mail fundraising. Chapter One, “The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail,” approaches the topic from a big-picture perspective, discussing what you can expect from direct mail and what you can’t. “Selecting Your Audience,” Chapter Two, introduces the all-important topic of mailing lists. Chapter Three, “Preparing Your Test Mailing,” explains how to design and produce an initial test—your ﬁrst venture into the world of direct mail donor acquisition. In “Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package,” which is Chapter Four, you’ll get a surgeon’s-eye view of a direct mail appeal, component by individual component. Chapter Five delves into “Premiums and Other Involvement Devices,” techniques that are widely used to boost response. “Building Your Donor Base,” Chapter Six, rounds out Part One with a discussion of the long-term process that characterizes every successful direct mail fundraising program.

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1 The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

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or many nonproﬁt organizations, direct mail fundraising is a question of life or death. Often it is strategically important, simply because so much money is involved. No one really knows how much American charities raise in a year, but the best available estimate for the year 2002 (from Giving USA 2003, AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, p. ii) is that the ﬁgure topped $240 billion. This doesn’t include volunteer hours contributed by 83.9 million American adults, representing the equivalent of over 9 million full-time employees at a value of $239 billion, according to Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 2001. It’s particularly difﬁcult to determine how much of that money was contributed in response to appeals sent by mail. But after studying the ﬁgures and the techniques by which they were gathered, the Direct Marketing Association concluded that direct mail yielded more than $44 billion for nonproﬁt organizations in 2002. Forty-four billion dollars. That’s a big business by anyone’s standards. Direct mail fundraising is a business that very few nonproﬁt organizations can afford to ignore or misunderstand. Although direct mail has become increasingly competitive, expensive, and difﬁcult in recent years, other sources of charitable and public interest funding have also become more difﬁcult to tap: • Government grants: Grants from the federal government were sharply curtailed in the 1980s and 1990s, and the return of massive budget deﬁcits in the

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opening decade of the new century offers little hope that future administrations will be much more generous to nonproﬁts. • Foundations: At best, foundations have always been reluctant to fund programs in perpetuity. Despite recent efforts to persuade foundation executives to grant funds for general support, most still want only to provide leadership gifts for pilot or demonstration projects. And seed grants for fundraising programs are the exception, not the rule. • Corporations: Corporate giving rises and falls with frequent changes in tax laws and trends in corporate ﬁnance. The mergers and acquisitions characteristic of the closing years of the twentieth century and the opening years of the twentyﬁrst have reduced many corporate philanthropic budgets. In addition, mushrooming sales of products and services by nonproﬁt enterprises have attracted unwelcome attention by the IRS and Congress, and statutory changes threaten this rich source of ﬁnancial support for many organizations. By comparison, direct mail may be an extremely attractive option for your organization. It’s the most widely employed technique for seeking ﬁnancial support from large numbers of individuals. Of the estimated $240 billion donated by Americans in 2002, more than $183 billion came from individuals; corporations contributed $12 billion and foundations approximately $27 billion. Even the remaining $18 billion in bequests originated from individuals; they were simply no longer alive. Taken together, contributions from individuals accounted for about 84 cents of every dollar received by charity, and I know of no reason why more skillful use of direct mail fundraising techniques wouldn’t allow us to increase that proportion. Because of its ability to target, reach, and motivate individual people in large numbers, direct mail has come to occupy a signiﬁcant place in our society and culture. Direct mail helps account for the vigor and broad scope of the so-called third sector or independent sector—that proliferation of seemingly countless voluntary associations in America about which de Tocqueville commented with such wonder nearly two hundred years ago. There is no other country in which private citizens, working together in voluntary nongovernmental organizations, play such a vital role. U.S. nonproﬁts meet urgent human needs, train our young, enrich our culture, and help shape our public policy. They are a principal mechanism in the larger system of checks and balances that guarantees the stability of American democracy. Chances are your organization is already involved in direct mail fundraising. Even if you don’t use direct mail to recruit or acquire donors, members, or subscribers, direct mail is probably an essential component of your overall development program. You may just call it something else.

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

Membership renewal notices, annual appeals, newsletters, special appeals, action alerts, annual reports, house mailings, letters from the executive director, emergency appeals, subscription renewal notices—all these and many more possible forms of communication between you and your supporters play vital roles on the larger stage of your development program. It makes no difference at all whether you call these communications direct mail or not. Direct mail communications can help or hinder not only your fundraising efforts but all the work you do. Too many “emergency appeals” may undermine your credibility. Delays in sending dues renewal notices may cause your membership to shrink. Conﬂicting messages may confuse your clients or constituents. Failure to keep your supporters up-to-date through a newsletter may mean their response to your annual appeal will be poor. Multiple mailings of the same letter can anger even an ardent supporter. To ensure that all these communications devices play a constructive role, it’s important to take a close look at them as a whole in the context of your relationship with your constituency and to consider how they all ﬁt into your organization’s strategy. One thing is certain: your supporters will expect something in the mail from you. Mailing brings organizational credibility. Voters often tell campaign volunteers, “I’ll just wait till I see something in the mail before I make up my mind.” Your donors or members may be waiting, too. Direct mail fundraising isn’t just about money. It’s often used to cultivate and recruit volunteers or prospects for fundraising dinners or other events. Direct mail is widely used for grassroots lobbying or other forms of political action by public policy groups and political campaigns. Schools, colleges, hospitals, and cultural institutions make wide use of direct mail to promote their community programs. Direct mail is a ﬂexible tool that you can use to serve any one of a great number of organizational strategies. If direct mail fundraising works for your organization, it can take you down ﬁve divergent paths: 1. Growth—by helping you build a bigger membership or list of contributors (called a donor base) 2. Involvement—by persuading your supporters to become actively involved 3. Visibility—by publicizing your work among a particular constituency or the public in general 4. Efﬁciency—by maximizing the net revenue you derive from your mailings and thus raising funds at the lowest possible cost per dollar raised 5. Stability—by reaching and maintaining an optimum level of direct mail fundraising activity

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For more information on these concepts, see my book, Five Strategies for Fundraising Success (2000). Later in this chapter, we’ll take a look at several hypothetical case studies to explore some of these strategic paths and their tactical implications, that is, the speciﬁc forms of activity these contrasting approaches require. I hope that using examples will make the difference between strategy and tactics clearer. First, however, let’s get down to the basics of direct mail fundraising so that we can establish a common basis of understanding the issues.

What You Can Expect from Direct Mail Direct mail is a difﬁcult and expensive way to raise money. It requires capital investment, marketing skill, patience, and managerial agility. Still, despite increased costs and an ever-ﬁercer competition for funds, direct mail fundraising remains the most effective way to build and cultivate a broad ﬁnancial base. Over time, a properly managed direct mail fundraising program may be able to provide you with predictable, continuing support year after year and yield big dividends for your other fundraising programs as well. But getting started in direct mail isn’t easy. It’s even harder if you have exaggerated or otherwise distorted expectations. I suggest the following as the ﬁrst principle of direct mail fundraising:

Most of the time, almost no one will respond to your appeals for funds from the public by mail. The only reason direct mail fundraising works is that someone who does send you a ﬁrst gift is very likely to send another when asked.

Direct mail fundraising is built on slim margins. Many mailings are regarded as very successful if just one in one hundred prospects responds with a gift. Of those who do respond, ten in one hundred may send their second gifts in response to a subsequent appeal. The trick, then, is to identify your best prospective donors, to persuade the largest possible number of them to become ﬁrst-time donors, to educate and motivate those newly acquired donors to give again and again, and to gain the maximum value from your committed donors by providing them with opportunities to support your organization ever more actively and generously. Nowadays for most nonproﬁts, acquiring new donors through the mail probably means losing money, at least on the initial effort. Nonproﬁt managers have to expect to lose 15 to 50 percent of their investment in mass-mail “prospecting” or “donor acquisition” programs carried out over time. That loss is sometimes even

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

greater in the initial test mailing, which generally requires an up-front investment in creative and management services. Despite the initial loss, this investment will help build your list of donors. However, it may be difﬁcult for you to see all the way to the other end of that particular tunnel. I often feel that counseling clients to expand their prospecting efforts in the face of mounting losses is a lot like saying to a child, “Eat your vegetables.” Prospecting is sometimes hard to swallow. If you do, however, you’ll see your list grow steadily over time and yield continuing dividends. Your newly acquired donors will, on average, remain donors for about two and one-half years. In that time, they’ll typically make two or three additional gifts, averaging up to one and one-quarter times the size of their initial contributions. Many will increase the frequency with which they give; they may also increase the size of their gifts. A very few will stay with you for life, loyally contributing year after year, and even go on giving after they die by remembering you in their wills. With the average charitable bequest estimated by the National Committee on Planned Giving to be $35,000, a few such legacy gifts can make a huge difference in the economics of a direct mail fundraising program. Equally signiﬁcant is that among these newly acquired donors will be some individuals willing to contribute—or help raise—major gifts. For some organizations, a major gift can be as little as $100; for others, it may be $1 million or more. But the principle is the same: direct mail can help you identify, recruit, cultivate, and educate that small, vital group of prospective major donors who are capable of making a very big difference for your organization. There’s no way to predict how many legacy and major donors will surface, but for many nonproﬁt organizations the gifts from these generous and committed donors eventually provide 50 percent—and ultimately perhaps 90 percent or more—of total annual income. But it takes a lot of hard work to achieve this enormous potential. A successful direct mail fundraising program requires a carefully orchestrated schedule of additional mailings as well as telephone contact. Believe it or not, extensive research and testing have demonstrated that direct mail donors (1) really do like receiving mailings, (2) enjoy giving to lots of organizations, and (3) make repeated gifts to the groups that interest them the most. That means your most active donors should receive six or more fund appeals per year from your organization. Some groups mail twelve, sixteen, or even twenty solicitations per year while also conducting telephone appeals and staging public events and other fundraising efforts. In the ﬁnal months before an election, at the end of the calendar year, just before a vote in Congress, or at some arbitrary program deadline, mail and telephone solicitations every seven to twelve days are not uncommon.

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It’s not difﬁcult to understand why we mail so frequently. Most donors, especially direct mail donors, make contributions from current discretionary income. At any given time, they’re likely to have only small amounts to spare. For all but the very rich or the very frugal, that’s life in America today. Even those generous donors whose gifts to you may total more than $100 per year may be more comfortable sending several $50 checks than one much larger donation. They may even think of themselves as “$50 donors” and reﬂexively send checks in that amount to several organizations each month that inspire them to give, perhaps even without regard to whether they’ve recently given to any of them. Most direct mail donors write checks to charity when they’re paying their bills on a weekly or monthly basis. Few people have large, ﬁxed pools of money into which they dip for the funds to make small contributions. Even if they plan and schedule their charitable giving, they’re likely to get the funds from their current income stream. Few donors are aware of how frequently they’re solicited by mail. Again and again, surveys and focus groups show that direct mail donors underestimate how many appeals they’ve received from a given organization. And although you may think that a majority are likely to complain about oversolicitation, most survey respondents say the frequency of appeals from organizations they support is “too little” or “just about right.” Complaints much more commonly arise from individuals who don’t support your organization. Nonetheless, in a well-run direct mail fundraising program, you’ll mail most of your appeals to only some of your donors. The key is to pick those who are most likely to respond and to plan the most effective possible sequence and combination of solicitations.

Kind Strangers and Loving Friends There are distinctly different types of mailings to meet different fundraising needs. In the broadest terms, mailings are intended either to acquire new donors, members, or subscribers or to resolicit previous donors for additional support. Between them is all the difference in the world. It’s the difference between the love of friends and the casual kindness of strangers.

Donor Acquisition Donor acquisition or prospect mailings—sometimes called cold mail—are designed to persuade each potential donor to take the big step of giving you a ﬁrst gift. Although there are occasional and notable exceptions, acquisition mailings tend to be relatively inexpensive ($0.30 to $1.00 each) and are often produced in large quantities (ﬁfty thousand to one million letters or more) and mailed relatively infre-

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

quently (perhaps two to six times per year). Acceptable response rates—the percentage of those who send gifts—are typically in the range of 0.5 to 2.5 percent. Acquisition mailings almost always cost more money than the total of contributions received; in other words, they don’t often break even. Their success or failure is generally evaluated in terms of donor acquisition cost, that is, the difference between the cost of the mailing and the amount it generates in contributions, divided by the number of donors acquired. For example, if a $50,000 mailing generates proceeds of $40,000 and 2,500 new memberships, the acquisition cost is $4 per member ($50,000 less $40,000 or $10,000 divided by 2,500). The key is to calculate a donor’s value over time and keep the acquisition cost as far below it as your organizational strategy may dictate. (We’ll go into that arithmetic in Chapter Six.) The logic of this process is derived from the world of commercial direct mail. Based on the behavior of past subscribers, Newsweek knows how likely you are to renew your ﬁrst-year subscription, and thus they know to the fraction of a cent how much additional revenue they can expect from you. L. L. Bean can guess to the penny how much additional merchandise you’ll buy. Both Newsweek and L. L. Bean are willing to pay to persuade you to purchase a subscription or a woolen shirt. They’re counting on the fact that sizable percentages of ﬁrst-time customers will buy more of their goods. Those percentages are sizable enough that Newsweek and L. L. Bean will probably pay a lot more in direct mail costs than the revenue they receive from you. But don’t shed any tears for them. Neither company is in any danger of going belly-up, because they make their proﬁt in repeat sales that more than compensate them for the loss of money in acquiring new customers. Many large direct-mail-based public interest organizations shrewdly apply similar rules in their donor acquisition programs. For some organizations (sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes not), no net loss in prospecting is acceptable. For others, the acceptable acquisition cost may range anywhere from $1 or $2 per donor to $25 or more. To achieve maximum economies of scale and help minimize your acquisition cost, you’ll usually do best to develop one general donor acquisition package and remail it indeﬁnitely in the largest possible quantities, so long as the package continues to produce acceptable results. Although you’ll be well advised to test alternative approaches at every opportunity, this standard or control package will become the backbone of your donor acquisition program. Ideally, the control package is an “evergreen” appeal, that is, it is theoretically good for all time. For example, the control package for the Wall Street Journal’s subscription promotion efforts in 2003 was reportedly ﬁrst mailed in 1974. Just as examples abound in the world of commercial advertising of familiar, long-running campaigns, there are many

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other examples of durable direct mail control packages in fundraising for nonproﬁts. Some large programs have several control packages, each targeting a different market, but the principle of standardization is much the same. See Table 1.1 for a cost comparison of a donor acquisition and a donor resolicitation mailing.

Donor Resolicitation By contrast, donor resolicitation mailings (also called house appeals or house mailings) have time value and are usually written afresh for each mailing. In an aggressive direct mail fundraising program revolving around a donor list of 250,000 individuals, this might mean designing and writing as many as two or three dozen resolicitation packages per year. To achieve optimal impact, you’re likely to invest more in these mailings ($0.50 to $5.00 each) and mail them selectively in smaller quantities, depending on the size of your donor list (3,000 to 150,000 letters). Response rates may range from 3 to 20 percent or more but are typically between 6 and 12 percent when sent to active, current donors. In any given year, you’ll mail both donor acquisition and donor resolicitation mailings. To get a sense of the proportions of those mailings in the ﬁrst year of a program, see Table 1.2. There are two types of resolicitation mailings: (1) donor or membership renewals and (2) so-called special appeals. Annual membership or donor renewal letters are used both by organizations with formal membership structures and with those that have learned how such devices can boost their renewal rates (the proportion of donors or members who contribute at least once during the year). Such groups mail a series of inexpensive renewal letters (as many as ten), with each member or donor receiving as many letters as necessary to force the issue. In a typical renewal series that is spaced out over six to ten months, perhaps 50 percent of the membership will sign up for another year, roughly half of them in response to the very ﬁrst effort and a quarter in response to the second. The ﬁnal effort in the series is calculated to recapture reluctant members at a cost at least as low as that of direct

TABLE 1.1. Donor Acquisition Versus Donor Resolicitation Mailings. Type Donor acquisition Donor resolicitation

Purpose

Cost per Piece

Quantity per Mailing

Response Rate

Recruit new donors

$0.35–$0.80

50,000–1,000,000

0.5–2.5%

Generate net revenue

$0.50–$5.00

3,000–150,000

6–15%

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The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

TABLE 1.2. Mailing Quantities in a Typical First-Year Program. Month

Donor Acquisition

January

050,000

Donor Resolicitation

February March April

1,000 100,000

May June

3,000

July August

150,000

September

5,000

October November

6,000

December

300,000

Total

600,000

15,000

mail prospecting (the acquisition cost). To get a sense of how a donor or membership renewal series might be scheduled, see Table 1.3. But this renewal series is not the organization’s only source of membership contributions. Well-managed groups also mail special appeals to their members—often no fewer than are mailed by groups without a formal membership structure. Table 1.4 portrays a simpliﬁed picture of a one-year mailing schedule for a program that includes three tracks: renewals, special appeals, and acquisition. Although an aggressive fundraising program may include a donor resolicitation every month, it’s unlikely that a large number of the donors on the “ﬁle” (computerese for “list”) will receive every appeal. Through a process called segmentation, mailers carefully select subgroups of donors for each package and each mailing in order to achieve optimal impact and increase the program’s cost-effectiveness. (We’ll discuss segmentation in detail in Chapter Four.) It’s normal to evaluate the success of renewal mailings in terms of net revenue. Although there are different yardsticks to measure the net, I usually look at the ratio of revenue-to-cost, which tends to range between two-to-one and ten-to-one in all but the very largest programs. (In other words, the cost of a dollar raised will range from $0.10 to $0.50.) The ratio is likely to vary greatly with the segmentation chosen, as some subgroups tend to be far more responsive than others. Accordingly, some donors receive many more mailings than do other donors. See Table 1.5 for a stylized representation of an annual direct mail segmentation plan.

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TABLE 1.3. Overall Plan for a Representative Renewal Series. Effort #

Weeks Before or After Membership Lapses

Typical Response Rate

1

12 weeks before

“Renew early”

2

8 weeks before

“It’s time to renew”

6–15%

3

4 weeks before

“A friendly reminder”

4–8%

4

1 week before

“Did you forget?”

3–6%

5

4 weeks after

“Your last newsletter just mailed”

3–5%

6

8 weeks after

“What’s the problem?”

10–15%

7

12 weeks after

Telephone reminder

36–69%

Total

24-week cycle

Theme

10–20%

Note: This plan assumes that renewals are timed to coincide with donor “anniversary dates.” In fact, many donor or membership renewal series are mailed on a ﬁxed annual schedule.

TABLE 1.4. Simpliﬁed Annual Mailing Schedule for a Three-Track Direct Mail Fundraising Program. Month

Renewals

Special Appeals

January February

Donor Acquisition 100,000

10,000

March April

8,000

May

7,000

June

6,300

July

5,800

August

5,500

September

4,900

100,000 2,000

100,000 5,000

October

100,000

November

10,000

December

5,000

Total Quantity

47,500

22,000

400,000

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The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

TABLE 1.5. Simpliﬁed Annual Direct Mail Segmentation Plan. Number of Previous Gifts Highest Previous Gift

3+

2

1

$100+ $25–$99 < $25

= 8 resolicitations per year

= 4 resolicitations per year

= 2 resolicitations per year

= 1 resolicitation per year

In short, then, the challenge you’ll face as you set out to launch a direct mail fundraising program is to acquire as many new donors as possible at a donor acquisition cost that is consistent with your strategy and to analyze, cultivate, and resolicit your donor ﬁle so you’ll derive the maximum beneﬁt for your organization. The approach you take to direct mail fundraising has to ﬁt your organization’s needs. Just as a Jaguar isn’t the best car for someone whose greatest need is for high fuel mileage, someone’s formula-driven approach to direct mail isn’t necessarily right for your organization.

Strategy and Tactics in Direct Mail Now that we share a common vocabulary and framework of understanding about direct mail fundraising, let’s take a look at how direct mail may be used as a strategic tool.

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Through strategic planning, a public interest group can identify its goals and priorities. Ideally, the organization’s staff leadership and board will undertake a formal process, producing a written document that spells out its strategy and identiﬁes the tactics to be used over a period of at least three years. Despite the admonitions of outside consultants and bothersome board members, most nonproﬁt organizations don’t adopt formal strategic plans. Nonetheless, even the most informal and inarticulate group needs to be clear about its long-term goals and know the difference between today and tomorrow. If you don’t understand why you’re in business and how you’ll marshal available resources to serve your organization’s ends, you’ve got much bigger problems than can be solved by starting a direct mail fundraising program. Once your priorities are clear, however, you can use direct mail fundraising to help you achieve growth, involvement, visibility, efﬁciency, stability—whichever one of these goals your strategy requires. Within the tactical context of your direct mail fundraising program, all ﬁve goals may be important and several of them indispensable. But as strategies, they’re mutually exclusive. To understand the tradeoffs and conﬂicts among them as you plan your direct mail fundraising program, consider four hypothetical case studies.

Case Study 1: Strategy Dictates Tactics Your strategic goal as executive director of a newly launched public policy organization is to reverse national policy on one highly controversial issue within ﬁve years. The issue isn’t so explosive as abortion rights or ﬂag burning; let’s say you want to lower the cost of auto insurance. Lacking other means, the strategy you’ve elected to bring this about is to mobilize public opinion and lobby the U.S. Congress for changes in the law. Your $500,000 budget is met by a few venturesome foundations and fewer than ﬁve hundred individual donors. Clearly, you lack the funding you need to mount the massive public relations campaign that might turn the tide in your favor. But you do have enough money to launch an aggressive direct mail donor acquisition program. If initial response is good, you might build a broad grassroots base for change within ﬁve years and ultimately generate the funds to support a professional media campaign that will change attitudes among the general public and in the Congress. This strategy dictates a likely set of tactics:

• A ﬁrst-year investment of $150,000 or more in direct mail, with additional investment in the second year • A grassroots lobbying campaign that asks prospective as well as proven donors to become actively involved by signing petitions, mailing postcards to Congress, and

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

the like (not to the exclusion of direct organizing and lobbying efforts but to supplement them) • Distinctive themes, logos, colors, and slogans consistently employed on all materials used in the ﬁve-year campaign • An active outreach effort to involve your donors in educating and recruiting additional supporters Although mailing millions of letters all across the country will enhance your visibility, it’s no substitute for the public exposure that a well-executed advertising and public relations effort might obtain for you on nationwide television. However, without a sizable base and enough of a track record to gain the attention of skeptical reporters, your chances of free media coverage are slim. A massive direct mail-based building program is the fastest way to get there. Moreover, once you’re there, the heightened public interest generated by national media coverage will boost your direct mail returns, perhaps dramatically. To gain the maximum beneﬁt from this approach, you’ll reinvest all the proceeds of your direct mail program in additional and larger mailings for at least the ﬁrst three years. Yes, this means that for three years every nickel of every direct mail contribution to your organization will be spent on mailing additional letters. These letters are the principal tool in service of your strategy, because they educate the public, involve thousands of people in active support of your cause, make you visible all across the country, and generate pressure directly on Congress. If survey research and initial direct mail testing demonstrate substantial support for your goal of lowering auto insurance rates, this set of tactics will give you a real shot at achieving your strategic goal. But none of these tactics—not even the multi-million-dollar prospecting program that is the centerpiece of the campaign—will be effective in isolation from the others. For example, without strong donor involvement and grassroots lobbying devices, the donor acquisition program will not support your strategy of bringing about a change in the law. All these tactics need to be seen in the larger context of organizational strategy and executed as a whole. To make the strategy work, you’ll also have to plan the effort with great care. At the outset, numerical projections will be speculative and only marginally useful. But once results are in from successful initial tests, you’ll be able to make meaningful projections. You’ll be able to see—and plan—your ﬁve-year direct mail program as a continuous process, with growth targets established for each quarter-year along the way and a gradually quickening rhythm of activity in the ﬁnal years that helps you reach your public policy goal. Strategy often dictates tactics. In this case, a substantial initial investment in direct mail, aggressive donor acquisition, and reinvestment for rapid growth, as well as a multifaceted program of donor involvement, are all simply tactical tools to use in support of your strategy.

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Case Study 2: Tactics Don’t Always Work You’re the executive director of an agency that provides vital human services for a population of one million. The city where your principal ofﬁce is located takes pride in its progressive tradition of providing for its least fortunate members. Your clients are disadvantaged teenagers. The strategy set by your board of trustees is to stabilize the agency’s ﬁnances by broadening and diversifying your ﬁnancial base. Currently, your $1 million budget derives from fees for service, government, and foundation funding, and from the generous support of a handful of major donors, several of whom sit on the board. The agency has good media contacts and has managed to acquire a highly favorable reputation with the general public. Although neither you nor your clients are front-page news, there’s lots of drama and human interest in your work. You’re convinced that direct mail will work well for you. However, because some of your larger grants are to be phased out soon, your budget may shrink by as much as $500,000 over the next three years. You hope that a direct mail fundraising program will enable you to make up the loss, thus contributing 10 percent of your annual budget within three years. Over the longer term, you hope it will yield a great deal more through collateral fundraising efforts such as legacy giving and major donor programs. One of your funders has agreed to underwrite the effort to launch a direct mail program. Among the tactics you’ve chosen to execute this diversiﬁcation strategy are a public relations campaign to raise your agency’s proﬁle and an aggressive donor acquisition program. You hope to build an active direct mail base of some thirty thousand names within three years, because you’ve been told that a fundraising program on that scale will generate net revenues of $500,000 per year. That approach won’t work. There simply aren’t enough people living within the region you serve to sustain a direct mail program of such broad scope. Let’s take a look at the numbers:

• Because of donor attrition during the three-year period (through death, illness, address changes, or changing priorities), you’ll have to acquire a total of perhaps 40,000 donors altogether. • To acquire 40,000 donors, you’ll probably need to mail 4 million prospect letters. Even with substantial reinforcement from a well-focused public relations campaign, a direct mail response rate of 1 percent would be quite respectable. • In other words, you’ll have to mail as many as 1 million letters in the ﬁrst year and 1.5 million in each of the following two years. There are only 1 million people living in your region, and relatively few of them can be considered good prospects. (Later, after we’ve discussed mailing lists in Chapter Four, you’ll understand this statement better.)

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

To carry out this strategy, your agency will need to become a household word locally. In neighborhoods where your best prospects live, you’ll need to persuade virtually every household to contribute to your work. This may be practical for a zoo or a museum with a creative community involvement program and lots of tangible membership beneﬁts, but it’s not in the cards for a social service agency. Here, more realistically, are your options: • Settle for a much smaller donor base and a much more modest contribution to your operating budget. Direct mail probably will work for your agency. It just won’t live up to unrealistic expectations. • Forego proﬁts entirely for three years—or even longer—as you reinvest them in donor acquisition and continuing public relations efforts. Even so, you may need to wait a lot longer than three years before the program begins to make a signiﬁcant contribution to your budget. • Consider whether the implications of your work warrant mailing outside your region, perhaps even nationally. • Look for other ways to supplement or substitute for direct mail donor acquisition. A broad-based program of neighborhood fundraising events may be feasible. So might a multimedia campaign to generate “inquiries” about your services from individuals who write or call in response to your offer to tell them “how you can help.” Direct mail appeals may succeed with these “qualiﬁed prospects” who have demonstrated interest in your work. However, despite your best efforts, it’s possible that direct mail will never generate net revenues of $500,000 per year for you. Strategy may dictate tactics, but the tactics must be realistic.

Case Study 3: Tactics Affect Strategy The challenge you face as chief executive ofﬁcer of a nationwide advocacy group is to maintain your large membership base, which is essential for your ongoing lobbying campaign, while increasing your operating budget by at least 20 percent annually over the next four years. The environmental issues your group addresses are of increasing concern to the general public, and your board is conﬁdent that there is lots of room for you to grow. The strategy you’ve successfully pursued for three years already is to publish and promote by direct mail a lush, four-color monthly magazine that is available to members only. Repeated testing has shown that, by highlighting this attractive membership beneﬁt, you can mail ﬁve million prospect letters per year and acquire forty thousand new members at an acquisition cost of just $5 with entry-level dues set at $12. But there’s

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a catch. It costs you another $10 per year to print and mail the magazine to each member, and the typical $12-member doesn’t respond well to appeals for additional gifts. The upshot is that your membership program as a whole isn’t operating at much better than breakeven. Even including signiﬁcant revenue from already renewed donors, the program is netting just enough to cover publication, distribution, and overhead costs, with no signiﬁcant net income to fund that 20 percent budgetary growth that is essential to your strategy. One tactical solution to this dilemma is to raise your membership dues—in effect, your subscription price—to $15, $18, $20, or $25 (with testing to determine the optimal level. (For a full discussion about direct mail tests, please see my book, Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3: Raise More Money with Direct Mail Tests.) Although the cost of fulﬁlling each individual magazine subscription will rise as circulation falls (because of reduced economies of scale), in all likelihood you’ll be able to ﬁnd a level of prospecting at which you can continue to acquire new members at breakeven while taking those added costs into account. If you reduce your prospecting volume, you’ll acquire fewer new members, so your membership base will shrink. But the shrinkage may be limited if you don’t encounter great resistance to the higher dues level. And you’ll be attracting members who will almost certainly respond better to your requests for more generous gifts. Because repeated testing shows that donors who send larger gifts also contribute more frequently and tend to be more loyal, those who pay dues of $20 or $25 per year are much more likely to be responsive to special appeals. You can then ﬁnance the desired budgetary growth from these appeals and from a beefed-up major gifts program. It’s also possible that with lower prospecting volume and fewer members, you’ll be able to cut costs in your fulﬁllment and membership departments, achieving the same effect as revenue growth. But there are ﬂaws in this tactical approach. You’ll be operating with a smaller base, which runs the risk of undercutting your lobbying campaign. You may also be forced to lay off staff. Either of these considerations may rule out cutbacks in your prospecting efforts. Thus the tactics required to execute a sound strategy may dictate other changes in the way you run your organization. Some of these, such as a membership base that shrinks too much or major changes in stafﬁng requirements, may have unintended and unfortunate consequences. Careful planning will help minimize the problems. But only a clear sense of strategic priorities will allow you to make decisions that are right for your organization.

Case Study 4: Time Is a Strategic Tool You’re managing the front-running campaign for governor in a prosperous industrial state with a population of ten million. Your candidate, a popular member of Congress, has everything going for her except money. Though the campaign is solvent and you’re

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

unlikely to face signiﬁcant opposition in the primary, it will be difﬁcult to raise enough money to mount a television advertising campaign in the general election. You’ll need at least $4 million to be competitive with the incumbent, whose campaign is awash in funds from PACs. Your strategy to win the general election, now ten months away, is to build a massive donor base that will produce an army of volunteers for an old-fashioned grassroots voter registration and “Get-Out-the-Vote” campaign while funding the overall effort. Your state party organization is weak, and its support for your candidate lukewarm because she represents unpopular policies and unwelcome change. Polls show she can build a majority coalition, but she’ll need to do so virtually overnight—and from the ground up. Direct mail is the principal means you’ve selected to execute this strategy. You hope to expand ﬁve-fold your candidate’s existing 20,000-name donor list. With 100,000 donors, a $4 million media budget will be within reach. Such a large list will also enable you to recruit two or three volunteers in every precinct in the state. And the donor acquisition effort itself will carry your candidate’s message into millions of households, laying the groundwork for the television and radio advertising campaign planned for the ﬁnal weeks before the general election. You’re prepared to invest as much as you need to make this strategy work. There seems to be only one problem. The $250,000 your campaign has in the bank must remain there for at least three more weeks, until the next ﬁnancial disclosure deadline has passed. If you remove the funds before then to launch a direct mail program, your campaign may look weak enough for primary opposition to surface. And you can’t ﬁnd direct mail vendors who are crazy enough to give you credit. In other words, you may lose almost one out of the ten remaining months before the election. Under the circumstances, even with ten full months ahead, you face a daunting challenge. To acquire 80,000 new donors will mean mailing four million letters (if the response rate is 2 percent—a level that is relatively more common in political fundraising than in the nonproﬁt world). A populist campaign that sparks widespread enthusiasm and lots of media coverage might be able to mail this intensively. The importance of the election and the candidate’s broad appeal may make it possible for you to prospect for donors on a modest scale outside the state, thus broadening your direct mail market. But time is a major limiting factor, both in and out of state. To conduct list and package testing and to read the results, you’ll need at least a couple of months at the outset. And unless your results are unrealistically strong, you’ll need to wind up your prospecting program a minimum of one or two months before the election. (Irrationally, response in political donor acquisition efforts often drops off as Election Day draws near. And unless you’re making a proﬁt from your prospecting program, the value of acquiring new donors will decline sharply as the number of resolicitation opportunities is reduced. In other words, you’ve got about six months to mail most of those four million acquisition packages—about 667,000 per month. Cutting one more month from the schedule will increase the monthly prospecting volume to 800,000.

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Those numbers aren’t impossibly high if your candidate has a national following, but you’re unlikely to be able to reach them in the time available. It would be unwise to build your election strategy on such unsteady ground. Direct mail fundraising makes sense for your campaign. It will contribute substantially to your media budget while playing an important role in increasing your visibility, spreading your message, and recruiting volunteers. You just aren’t likely to achieve as much as you’re hoping. There is a way to launch your effort more quickly than it might seem. With an urgent overnight appeal to the most generous of your candidate’s donors, you can solicit gifts before the ﬁnancial disclosure deadline. This appeal may generate the seed funds for a large-scale prospecting program while increasing your politically important bank balance. Presumably, you’ll be able to negotiate payment terms that allow you to begin work on a large donor acquisition mailing while leaving the money in the bank for the next three weeks. But that still leaves you with overambitious expectations for the direct mail program as a whole.

(A bit of advice for the next campaign: start building your donor base two years earlier, so you’ll be facing the active phase of the election campaign with a list of 50,000 donors—and a much more modest tactical challenge.) As you can see, direct mail fundraising is a ﬂexible tool, adaptable to a wide range of strategic and tactical challenges facing not-for-proﬁt organizations. But if this military terminology throws you off, there’s another way you can look at the uses of direct mail fundraising.

Direct Mail as a Problem-Solving Tool The most productive way I’ve found to view direct mail fundraising in the strategic planning process is as a method of problem solving. Once you’ve identiﬁed the problem—too few members to give you clout on Capitol Hill, too little money to meet your clients’ needs, too much unpredictability in your ﬁnances—you can devise a solution using direct mail techniques. The trick, of course, is to ﬁgure out what the problem is. • In the ﬁrst of these four case studies (the new public policy organization) is the central problem ﬁnding funds for a public relations campaign. Or is it controlling the cost of auto insurance? • In the hypothetical case of the human service agency, what’s more important: broadening the funding base in the long term or supporting the budget in the short run? • For the environmental advocacy group, is it a higher priority to maintain a large membership base or to maximize net income?

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

• In the example of the gubernatorial campaign, is direct mail most important for the ﬁnancial contribution it can make to the campaign or for its broader political value? The answers to these questions are not obvious. There are sound arguments for either side or for still different points of view. But it’s absolutely essential that these questions be resolved. Decisions need to be made one way or another. Muddled priorities are a prescription for failure. Designing an effective direct mail fundraising program is, ﬁrst of all, a matter of distinguishing strategy from tactics. And for the program to achieve its goals, that distinction must be clear to everyone involved in its management. The difference between strategy and tactics should never be forgotten. However, circumstances sometimes conspire against us. In some cases, our strategic needs—the problems we face—can’t be addressed using direct mail.

Direct Mail Is Not for Everyone Not long ago, what passed for conventional wisdom in direct mail fundraising was that your initial acquisition test mailing would be successful if it broke even—in other words, if it yielded enough in direct, immediate contributions to cover the full cost of the mailing. From this conventional point of view, your successful program would then proceed with a series of progressively larger donor acquisition mailings, breaking even all along the way, as you built an ever-bigger list of proven donors at no net cost. We know better nowadays. The recent experience of most small and mediumsized public interest groups—and of a great many large ones, too—has made it clear that direct mail fundraising may be hugely successful for them if they can acquire donors at an acceptable cost and then proﬁtably resolicit them. Even the most modest test results may lay the foundation for a fundraising program of enormous scale. But before we drift off into never-never land with our eyeballs full of dollar signs, let’s make sure we agree on something:

Every direct mail fundraising program must begin with a test mailing to determine the organization’s potential to raise money by mail, and that test mailing really is a test.

Direct mail is a risky business. Maybe, just maybe, your test won’t work. Sometimes a direct mail fundraising program gets off to a slow start. It may take more than one test mailing to identify a successful marketing concept or to ﬁnd

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the right market. But for some organizations, the cost of direct mail fundraising may be out of proportion to its potential yield. Remember, a direct mail donor prospecting program must deliver new donors at an advantageous acquisition cost. If it doesn’t do that, you’d better head back to the drawing board. Direct mail may not be right for you. Quite apart from the possibility that your initial test mailing may be poorly conceived or badly executed, public response may be limited for one or more of the following reasons: • There may not be enough people who agree that your organization ﬁlls an important need, or it may be difﬁcult to ﬁnd mailing lists on which their names and addresses appear. • People may agree that the work you’re doing is important but may not care strongly enough to send money. • The ever-ﬁckle public may feel that the need you’re ﬁlling has passed or simply isn’t urgent enough to require immediate support. Organizations that operate on a small scale may have an especially difﬁcult time launching the type of large direct mail fundraising programs I’m describing in these pages: those with annual budgets of less than $300,000 or with constituencies of fewer than one million people. Although there are important exceptions, for the most part the market for a local public interest group in all but the largest metropolitan areas may simply be too small to apply these techniques. Professionally managed direct mail fundraising is built on economies of scale. The limited size of your constituency or market is only one of several sound reasons not to embark on a program of direct mail fundraising. Direct mail may not be a good bet for you, and it may not even make sense for you to launch an initial test if any of the following conditions apply: • You lack the necessary capital to invest in a test mailing. • Your ﬁnances are fragile, and you can’t bear the risk of an unsuccessful test. • The issues involved in your work aren’t speciﬁc, compelling, and of concern to a broad public. • You can’t effectively distinguish your organization from others serving the same constituency by identifying something dramatic or unique about you or your work. • Your mission and strategy are unclear, so that it would be difﬁcult to package your programs for a wider public. • You’re just starting out and lack the track record, name recognition, or credentials to establish your credibility.

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

• You have neither sufﬁcient staff nor an outside ﬁrm to ensure that donors will get the service they need. • Your organization isn’t committed for the long haul. Can you ﬁnd your way over those hurdles? Do you already have in place a successful direct mail fundraising program, or have you conducted a successful initial test mailing? Read on, then! Here are the ten most important things about direct mail fundraising: 1. Direct mail fundraising is a process, not an event. Direct mail is a way to communicate with lots of people and to build rewarding relationships with them. Skillfully used (in combination with other direct response techniques), direct mail can lead donors through all the stages of the fundraising lifecycle. Individual mailings are mere building blocks in the relationship-building process; the only way to promote genuine donor development is through a continuing, year-round sequence of communications that includes many mailings in the course of a year. 2. The true rewards from direct mail come only over the long haul. The principal virtue of direct mail is that it can generate steady, predictable, undesignated income. Still, the richest rewards from a direct mail fundraising program may come in the form of bequests or other forms of planned gifts, and such a gift may not come until ﬁfteen or twenty years after a donor is recruited by mail. The success of a direct mail fundraising program is often evaluated by comparing the acquisition cost for new donors with the demonstrable long-term value they bring to the organization—benchmarks that cannot even be reliably calculated in fewer than ﬁve years. 3. Cost is less important than cost-effectiveness. It costs money to raise money. Sometimes net revenue rises when an investment in a mailing is enlarged. In any case, the sheer cost of a mailing is less important than its outcome. It usually pays to invest more in top donors, less in the least responsive and least generous donors. Cheaper is not always better. 4. The list is paramount. It’s worth emphasizing over and over again: the list is by far the most important factor in a mailing. The difference between mailing to alumni or nonalumni, to old alums or more recent, cash-starved alums, to donors or nondonors, to direct mail responders or nonresponders, or simply to one list that has proven to be responsive instead of another that hasn’t, can make or break a mailing. 5. Next comes the offer. The offer you make to the recipients of your mailing is next in importance only to the list. If you’re mailing to solicit an annual gift or membership renewal, it’s important that the offer appear front and center in the package. In fundraising, the offer revolves around the fundamental reason you’re mailing, for example, whether to recruit new donors, renew existing donors’ annual

31

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Revolution in the Mailbox

support, enlist them in a monthly giving club, secure special gifts, or persuade them to remember your organization in their wills. Each of these “marketing concepts” requires a very distinctive letter. 6. Segmentation is the key to cost-effectiveness. Whom you include in a mailing and whom you exclude determines the outcome of a mailing. It rarely makes sense to mail an appeal to everyone on your donor ﬁle. Almost always, such an effort will be far more cost-effective if you exclude those who haven’t contributed during the last two or three years or who haven’t contributed more than token gifts. Equally important, by segmenting your list—dividing it into subgroups based on past performance—you can reserve special treatment for your top donors (ﬁrst-class postage, personalization, and higher production values). Special treatment like this frequently pays off in bigger returns. 7. Annual giving provides the structure for direct mail fundraising. One of the most basic assumptions in direct mail fundraising is that donors must be encouraged to give at least one gift per year; less frequent giving is unlikely to produce enough net revenue to justify the effort. In many organizations, an annual campaign or annual fund serves as the vehicle to inculcate this idea in donors’ minds. Other organizations adopt a “membership” structure and often employ a “renewal series” to urge donors to meet their implied obligation to contribute at least once annually. The renewal series, based on the model of magazine subscription renewal notices, entails sending members a series of notices—usually between three and ten—until they respond with gifts. This approach is usually very cost-effective and promotes donor loyalty as well. Even those nonproﬁts that maintain neither an annual fund nor a membership campaign are likely to mail a year-end holiday appeal to their donors every year. 8. Testing leads to incremental improvements over time. The distinguishing characteristic of direct response, which includes direct mail, telemarketing, direct response television, and e-mail marketing, is that its results are precisely measurable. If you want to know which of two offers will produce the better results, you can (normally) construct a test, simultaneously mailing letters containing one offer to Group A and letters containing the other offer to Group B, with the two groups chosen at random from the same list so that they are statistically identical. Testing allows direct mail fundraisers to boost results over time by identifying (and then putting to work) the most successful lists, offers, and messages. 9. Repetition is essential. Success in direct mail fundraising, as in any area of marketing or advertising, requires that materials have a consistent “look and feel” over time. This normally means using the same logo, theme, slogan, or tagline long after the organization’s board members and executives have concluded that they’re boring. Repetition reinforces donors’ views of an organization. In modern parlance, it helps a nonproﬁt establish and sustain its “brand identity.”

33

The Strategic Uses of Direct Mail

10. Without timely and accurate record keeping, direct mail is impossible. The donor database is the sine qua non of direct mail fundraising. Without an up-todate database, fundraisers can’t measure results, segment, test, or assess the success of their development program. And building relationships with donors requires detailed record keeping; otherwise, how could we know which donors are strong performers and which are weak?

••• OK, then. Now that we have a handle on the most important factors in direct mail fundraising, let’s set out on our journey to get your organization into the mail. It’s natural, of course, that we would start that journey by viewing the single most important consideration in any mailing: the list or lists of people to whom we mail. That’s the subject of the following chapter.

2 Selecting Your Audience

S

top! Before you plunge into thinking about the lists of people you want to send your appeal to, make sure you’re absolutely clear about the purpose of your mailing. Is it intended to acquire (recruit) new donors or members? Or is its purpose, instead, to resolicit (or to cultivate, educate, or upgrade) existing donors? In either case, the choice of lists is critical, but the process for choosing a list is very different. In this chapter, we’ll look ﬁrst at acquisition lists. Then we’ll turn to the selection of lists for resolicitation mailings—the process called segmentation.

Choosing Lists for Donor Acquisition Mailings In the 2002/03 edition of the mailing list catalog used most widely in the direct mail industry, there are entries for nearly nineteen thousand lists. The catalog itself comes in two volumes that together are four and one-half inches thick. Yes, you got that right: nineteen thousand different mailing lists! It’s a big business. Lists are created because organizations save the names of their members or supporters. Publications maintain lists of their subscribers. Government agencies keep records of license-holders and taxpayers. Merchants and catalog merchandisers track their buyers. There are also companies in the business of compiling lists speciﬁcally for proﬁt. Individual lists vary in size from a few hundred names to more than ninety million. All told, there are tens of billions of names and addresses appearing in these

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Revolution in the Mailbox

readily available mailing lists. Most of the more than 280 million living Americans appear dozens of times, and so do quite a few who are dead. Many of us are included as individuals on literally hundreds of lists. Mailing lists are by no means all alike. There are numerous ways to categorize them, but in the context of direct mail fundraising, it’s useful to group them into seven general types: 1. Donors. These people have contributed money, most likely in response to direct mail fundraising appeals. 2. Members. They’ve paid membership dues to an organization, probably by mail. 3. Subscribers. These folks subscribe to a particular periodical. Many ﬁrst did so in response to a direct mail subscription promotion. 4. Buyers. They’ve bought books or other goods by mail, in most cases through a catalog they received in the mail. 5. Inquirers and sweepstakes entrants. These are individuals who have responded to an ad or a direct mail package with a request for information or a response to a survey or sweepstakes. They sent in little if any money. 6. Compiled lists. These are second-generation lists, produced by merging lists from different sources or assembling them from raw data. For example, someone might compile a list of people who have joined or written letters of inquiry to many different organizations, perhaps dissimilar ones. Someone else’s idea of a useful compiled list might be those individuals whose lifestyle or demographic characteristics, as revealed by such means as auto registrations or property tax rolls, ﬁt a certain predetermined pattern. With rare exceptions, compiled lists do not consist of people whose principal shared characteristic is that they’ve contributed or spent money by mail. 7. “Good ideas.” These are the people on your board chair’s Rolodex, or a list of your friends or neighbors, or the thousands of individuals to whom you’ve been sending your newsletter because somebody ﬁve years ago was just sure they would take any opportunity to support you. (They haven’t, and they probably won’t.) There are thousands of available lists in each one of the ﬁrst six of these categories. In a few cases, they’re available directly from the list owner. Hundreds of “list brokerage” ﬁrms manage the others, representing the owners to negotiate and manage the arrangements under which outsiders use their lists. The marketplace is extensive, and list brokers tend to specialize, not just in such broad-brush areas as fundraising but in narrowly deﬁned ﬁelds such as liberal or conservative political lists, Catholic lists, or New Age lists. I don’t hear very often about list brokers

Selecting Your Audience

going out of business, so I assume they’re doing well. (Brokers typically work by commission, charging a percentage of the rental price, so the more you mail, the more money they make.) Through list brokers, you’re able to gain access to the overwhelming majority of those nineteen thousand lists. Most are available on computer tapes in one or another of several standard formats that a direct mail service bureau is able to read. (Some lists are still available only on mailing labels, although that has become rare, as mailers turn increasingly to ink-jet and laser printers to address their mailings.)

The problem you face isn’t getting hold of enough lists. It’s ﬁguring out which of them are likely to work for you. Very few will.

Only a handful of lists will be sure bets to work for your initial direct mail fundraising appeal. These so-called “hot” lists, such as names of people who’ve written to ask you for information or donors to organizations engaged in very similar work, are sometimes hard to come by. “Warm” lists are a little easier to obtain. These are the ﬁles that, based on experience with similar appeals, we feel are likely to be responsive enough to be cost-effective. But most lists are “cold.” Only testing can tell whether they’ll respond cost-effectively, and in most cases testing is a long shot. The overwhelming majority of cold lists, as far as you’re concerned, might as well be printed with invisible ink. They simply won’t work for your donor acquisition campaign, and you might as well forget about trying. A list broker can provide you with a substantial amount of information, free of charge, about each list you want to consider. It’s standard practice in the list industry for brokers to supply a “data card” (see Exhibit 2.1) for each list. Typically, these data cards reveal the total size of the list, the date it was last updated, the circumstances under which it was created, the gender composition, the minimum number of names that must be ordered (or at least paid for), and sometimes a wealth of other data as well. If the list owner will permit you to slice and dice the list, perhaps geographically, by gender, by minimum gift, or purchase amount, for example, the data card will make that clear and state the cost of doing so. Choosing the right prospect lists is a demanding and sophisticated task, and it’s often counterintuitive. For example, as a group, millionaires aren’t good donor prospects for a group seeking to aid the homeless; neither are people who are homeless. Just because one group has a lot of money and the other has an intense interest in the issue is no guarantee that either will respond to the appeal. And if you’re tempted to send your appeal to doctors or lawyers because both groups are

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Revolution in the Mailbox

EXHIBIT 2.1. List Broker’s Data Card for a Direct Mail Fundraising List. Source: CELCO. Reprinted with permission.

Selecting Your Audience

typically well-to-do, think again. Simple ability to give doesn’t often translate into willingness to give. You see, there’s an ugly truth that applies even to your organization. Yes, yours is unquestionably the most exciting venture to come down the pike since the founding of the Smithsonian Institution. Even so, very few people who are approached by mail will agree to support you under the best of circumstances. That unpleasant fact, together with the limit on the money you’re able to invest in direct mail donor acquisition, requires a very selective approach to the tens of thousands of available mailing lists. To sift through all the possible lists for your initial prospect mailing, we look at each list to evaluate the following elements: • Donor history. The rule of thumb in our business is that the people who are most likely to give to you by mail are those who have previously given by mail. I’ve never heard a credible estimate of the percentage of the population that ﬁts this category, but I suspect it’s small—certainly a lot less than half and probably less than a quarter of the American people. The best place to start looking for them is on donor lists. • Mail-responsiveness. Generally, the best prospects are those who’ve developed the habit of using the postal system. That doesn’t include everyone. Industry surveys suggest that only a little more than half of the American public will send money by mail for any reason whatsoever other than to pay taxes, rent, or utility bills, and many people still won’t even do that. One measure of mail-responsiveness comes from the Direct Marketing Association, which reported to me in response to an inquiry that more than 42 million Americans, or about 21 percent of the adult population, ordered products by mail in the year ending spring 2002. • Recency. One of the problems with most mailing lists is that they’re not kept sufﬁciently up-to-date. In a society where one-ﬁfth of the population moves every year, this can be a real problem. Generally speaking, only a mailing list that has been updated within the past twelve months is useful for fundraising purposes. A four- or ﬁve-year-old list may be worthless. • Accuracy. A related problem for fundraisers is that the data entry on many publicly available mailing lists is atrocious. Some otherwise attractive lists may be poor prospects for your donor acquisition campaign simply because the list owner or the computer service bureau that maintains the list does such a consistently careless job. Among the most common and problematic errors are failing to record address changes and misspelling names or addresses, both of which lead to high levels of undeliverable mail and to costly duplicate entries. • Afﬁnity. If your organization is building a children’s hospital in Africa, donors to Save the Children or UNESCO might be a good bet for you to test in your donor

39

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Revolution in the Mailbox

acquisition campaign. The members of the National Riﬂe Association probably aren’t. However, afﬁnity is highly overrated and very limiting. The subscribers to a magazine specializing in international affairs could turn out to be your most responsive list of all. For one thing, that list may be far more accurate and up-to-date than most donor lists. Because it’s so difﬁcult to predict which lists will work, we do our best to ﬁnd out (often through list brokers) which ones worked for similar appeals, thus taking the concept of afﬁnity one step further. Based on these criteria, you’ll select an appropriate “list of lists” for each donor acquisition mailing. In a modest initial test mailing, you might select a dozen lists, ordering samples of ﬁve thousand names from each (see Exhibit 2.2). In a later, larger mailing, you might pick several dozen lists, representing both “continuations” (additional names from lists that yielded good test results) and new, as yet untested lists (see Exhibit 2.3).

The Marketplace of Lists Most people seem to have the impression that mailing lists are bought and sold. In fact, this is only rarely the case. Lists are typically made available to direct mailers for one-time use only and may not be duplicated or re-used without explicit permission (which isn’t often granted).

EXHIBIT 2.2. Lists of Lists for an Acquisition Test Mailing. Source: Riverkeeper. Reprinted with permission of Riverkeeper.

41

Selecting Your Audience

LISTS TO ORDER Prepared by Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc. for NATIONAL COUNCIL OF LA RAZA Acquisition mailing #48–05 400,000 pieces to mail List Name Continuations America’s Magazine Amnesty International DNC Hispanic Mag Hispanic Business Planned Parenthood Time Inc. Database UNICEF

Select

Universe

Quantity

Net Qty

Eng. Edition Actives Actives/Hispanic Active Donors/Hispanic actives Active US Subs Active Donors/Hispanic Act. Hispanic/FR Contrib 12 mos, 5+, Hisp. Surn.

13,130

13,130 2,857 10,000 133,000 200,000 2,910 25,000 4,287

11,817 2,571 9,000 119,700 180,000 2,619 22,500 3,858

391,184

352,065

3,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 3,300 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000

2,700 4,500 4,500 4,500 4,500 4,500 4,500 4,500 2,970 4,500 4,500 0 4,500 4,500

61,300

55,170

5,000

4,750

133,000 221,961 2,910

Subtotal Tests ACLU Am. Inst. Cancer Research Amnesty International Atlantic Mosaic American Donor Connect Conde Nast Covenant House DNC Handgun Control Latina Planned Parenthood SPLC UNICEF United Farmworkers

Hispanic Surname Hispanic 12 mos. $20+ Donors TX/NM/AZ Hispanic 12 mos/Hispanic/States Hispanic Spanish Speaking Donors TX/NM/AZ Hispanic Surname Active Subscribers SCF select Hispanic Surname SCF select Active Donors

Subtotal House lists Survey Respondents

NCLR House list

TOTAL TO MAIL

EXHIBIT 2.3. List of Lists for an Acquisition Rollout Mailing. Source: National Council of La Raza. Reproduced with permission.

139,909 151,479 45,579 182,222 139,345 27,857

110,000

198,121 46,224

411,985

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Revolution in the Mailbox

Sometimes, lists are available on a rental basis. These days, the going rate for most desirable donor and subscriber lists is in the range of 8 to 12 cents per name ($80 to $120 per thousand names). Some lists of buyers are even more costly. If you’re forced to rely heavily on rentals, list costs may constitute one-sixth to onethird the entire cost of your donor acquisition mailing. However, in many cases you’ll be able to exchange lists and dramatically reduce this expenditure. Normally, exchanges are on a name-per-name basis. In other words, an exchange will obligate you to provide an equal number of equivalent names and addresses from your mailing list, usually weeks or months later. The cost of list exchanges is modest in comparison with list rentals. The problem is, the owners of some lists that are available only on exchange may not be willing to trade with you. Unless you already have a sizable list of your own to prove your ability to reciprocate, you won’t receive permission to use their lists. If you’re like most people I know, however, letting your organization’s donor list out of your hands seems about as attractive as contracting a terminal illness. Here, then, is another reality you’ll have to face at the outset: in North America, the business of direct mail fundraising is built in large part on (relatively) free commerce in lists, and groups that lack desirable mailing lists or refuse to trade or rent their own are operating at a serious disadvantage. (Circumstances may be different in other parts of the world.) There are three principal reasons some organizations advance to explain why they won’t exchange or rent their lists. All lack substance. First, it’s said that once a list is in the marketplace, it’s vulnerable to theft. This idea is simple to combat. Like everyone else in the business, we insert what are termed seed names in each list we trade or rent; these are dummy names and addresses known only to us and not to the mailer who’s getting our list. When the list is actually used, we receive seed packages at these dummy addresses. If packages turn up when they weren’t supposed to, we take action. It almost never happens, and practical remedies are available if and when it does. A second objection often raised to justify withholding a donor list from the market is that it will allow other organizations to “steal” a group’s donors by making more powerful and effective appeals. This reﬂects an unfortunate but common misunderstanding about fundraising realities: no organization “owns” its donors. Almost all donors contribute to a great many organizations, certainly not just one. This is especially true of direct mail donors. In fact, a recent poll of donors in North America cosponsored by my agency and a similar ﬁrm in Canada revealed that direct mail donors support an average of fourteen nonproﬁt organizations per year. Under some circumstances, such as when the timing of an appeal is inconvenient, it might make good sense to deny permission to competitive organizations to use your list. But most of the time it makes no sense at all. The truth is, a directly com-

43

Selecting Your Audience

petitive organization probably has half a dozen other ways to reach your donors with its appeal—through the periodicals they’re likely to read or the areas where they live or the other groups to which they contribute. You might as well be neighborly about it and get something in return. Figure 2.1 illustrates the reality that your donors possess many other interests and aren’t really “your” donors at all. The third reason frequently given to deny outside access to an organization’s donor list is that the list will be “worn out” by overuse if other groups mail their appeals to it. My intuition tells me that there’s some truth to this and, like some of my equally cautious colleagues in the industry, I normally recommend that outside use of a list be limited to a maximum of one mailing per week and avoided altogether during certain critical times on the fundraising calendar. But I honestly can’t say I’ve ever seen any evidence, convincing or otherwise, that heavy outside usage of a donor list makes any difference whatsoever. Some people even contend that it’s advantageous to allow others to appeal to your list, because it helps cultivate the habit of giving by mail!

What to Do About Duplicate Appeals At the outset, you may be able to avoid the issue of duplicate appeals. With initial test mailings of fewer than 50,000 names, it’s generally not recommended to take steps to reduce duplication. In small mailings, the proportion of duplicates is

FIGURE 2.1. Schematic Representation of Donors’ Overlapping Interests.

X’s Subscribers

A’s Donors

Y’s Subscribers

B’s Donors

YOUR DONORS F’s Members

E’s Members

C’s Donors

D’s Donors

44

Revolution in the Mailbox

usually tiny. Sooner or later, though, the issue will catch up with you, because your donors (or your trustees) write or call to complain, or because it dawns on you how much money you’re losing by printing and mailing duplicates. For some organizations, this becomes an emotional issue of major proportions. It’s wise to think through in advance how you’ll handle it. Let’s assume you and the chair of your board’s fundraising committee have the same visceral reaction to duplicates as I do: you despise them. You may also be convinced that enough of your potential supporters will be annoyed by receiving duplicate appeals that in the long run it will even be worthwhile to pay a little extra for the test mailing to cut down the number of duplicates. Using a computer technique called a merge-purge, it’s possible to combine all the names in your mailing into one merged list and then to identify and isolate the duplicates (called multi-buyers, multi-donors, or merge dupes) so you can save money on printing and postage. However, it’s not quite that simple. For one thing, merge-purge is a costly procedure, running nearly 2 cents per name (or $16 to $18 per thousand names). In most situations, a merge-purge will save you money, but not always. In a 50,000-piece test mailing, you’re unlikely to pay as much as $1,000 for a merge-purge, but the cost may mount to many thousands of dollars in larger acquisition mailings. A merge-purge often adds days—perhaps a week or longer—to the time needed to prepare a mailing. Like the added cost, this is a price that needs to be analyzed. Merge-purge is a broad concept that refers to a range of techniques and approaches. Some merge-purge programs are permissively loose, allowing lots of possible duplicates to get through for fear of cutting down on the number of good names to mail. And some programs are tight; the difference can be considerable. Merge-purge programs sometimes offer many optional features: correcting bad ZIP codes, eliminating incomplete names and addresses, sorting names into order for USPS presort discounts, screening for surnames of particular ethnicity, afﬁxing the congressional district or other geodemographic information, and other possible enhancements. The list is long, and the implications for your direct mail program can be signiﬁcant. For an organization with a donor list of signiﬁcant size, there is one overwhelming reason to conduct a merge-purge for every prospect mailing: it makes it possible to eliminate most (though not all) of your own donors. Not doing so may be very costly. Some of your contributors will become mightily annoyed by receiving duplicate appeals, especially appeals that don’t recognize the fact that they’ve already given you money. More important, however, your prospect letter probably doesn’t ask for a big enough gift and will give your donors a way to get off the hook with smaller gifts than they would send in response to a resolicitation. That can make a very big difference indeed in your fundraising results.

Selecting Your Audience

If you actually read a merge-purge report, you’ll lose forever any remaining illusion that your donors are exclusively your own. The report for your initial test mailing may show 10 or 20 percent overlap among the lists you’re testing. In larger rollout or continuation mailings, the duplication rate may be 40 percent or higher. The rate will vary greatly from one list to another, but you’re likely to ﬁnd that the very best lists—those most responsive to your appeals—are the ones that overlap the most with your own list (and with each other). Those that overlap the least and are thus most dissimilar tend to be less responsive. Exhibit 2.4 shows one of several hundred pages in a merge-purge report. It displays forty-eight lists included in a donor acquisition mailing for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. They’re ranked in increasing order of duplication with existing donors to the Foundation. At the low end, 2.08 percent of the names on the J. Crew Active Buyers were duplicates of Foundation donors. At the high end (on the bottom of the page), just under 60 percent of Names Project donors were duplicates. In an ongoing direct mail fundraising program that has yielded a sizable donor list, it’s common for the range of duplication rates to be very wide. In a typical 50,000-piece test mailing, you may ﬁnd you’ll need a total of 56,000 names, or an additional 12 percent, to produce the correct number of mailing labels. Merging 56,000 names derived from, say, 12 different lists, the computer may identify approximately 47,000 as “unique” names. The other 9,000 names duplicate some of the 47,000 unique names and, in some cases, each other as well; 3,000 of the 9,000 merge-dupes match just one of the 47,000 names. These 3,000 will be formed into a list of their own; including the 47,000 unique names, this will make a total of 50,000 names “out of merge” on 12 original lists plus a list of mergedupes. The other 6,000 names are either multiple duplicates (which appear on 3 or more lists) or bad addresses. In the case of this test mailing, we’ll ignore all 6,000 of these names (since we’re already mailing them at least once), but in a larger, continuation mailing we might mail many of them again. See Table 2.1 for a simpliﬁed look at how a merge-purge might work. Does that sound nuts? It’s not. The list of merge-dupes has a special function— one that helps to justify the cost and the time spent on the merge-purge. Since you’ve already paid for the duplicates at least twice (either in cash or in names to be exchanged), it’s perfectly appropriate for you to mail to them twice. It’s often proﬁtable, since these are the names of those who are most likely to respond to your appeal. Some of these individuals are direct mail junkies who may contribute regularly to scores or even hundreds of organizations (and some are probably consultants like me who are reading everything the competition is sending out). Chances are, you’ll mail the merge-dupes three to six weeks following the main maildate of your test, and the list will likely perform at least as well as the average of the other twelve lists. Occasionally, it proves to be the best of them all. In a larger

45

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Revolution in the Mailbox

11/05/02 STATSRUS

TRIPLEX DIRECT MARKETING

SF AIDS FOUNDATION MP9413A LIST NAME SFAF SEEDS SFAF SAMPLE SEEDS SFAF LOW SFAF LAPSED SFAF FORMER J CREW ACT BUYERS INSTYLE MAGAZINE RUN 01 ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY POTTERY BARN METROPOLITIAN HOME J. JILL MARTHA STEWART M AWSF 01 + 02 AM INST CANCER RESEARCH SUN MAGAZINE ARCHITECHURAL DIGEST KQED NATL FOUND CANCER RESRCH ADVOCATE NEW YORKER SPECIAL OLYMPICS OAKLAND SPCA TARGET MODEL PUBLIC CITIZEN CAR 5–8 ALC 02 SF CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC UCS ORBIS SAVE THE BAY ACLU AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL OUT MAGAZINE CARE CLINTON PRES LIBRARY LIBERATION PUBLICATION JEWISH FMLY CHDRN SVC SF SPLC HANDGUN CNTRL RAPHAEL HOUSE LARKIN ST YOUTH SERVICES GLAAD TNDC PROJECT OPEN HAND GLSEN AMFAR ACTIVE NAMES PROJECT

PAGE 2.000 MERGE/PURGE AT A GLANCE LIST %

ID# 100 101 $1–24 .99 0–18 68 $25+ 19–36 69 $25+ 37+ 77 3 42 $25+ 202 43 64 7 12 36 $50+ 79 $10+ 6 MO 10 58 57 14 $15+ 12 MO 50 (0–6 MO) 59 ACTIVE SUBS 44 $10+ 12 MO 45 63 46 47 $25+ 201 $25+ 200 13 27 48 24 29 25 ACT SUBS 60 $10+ 12 MO 22 18 ACT SUBS 61 21 24 MO 20 BRADY CAMPAIGN 23 53 54 28 16 8 26 62 51

– – – – –

0%

0.00 0.00 0.99 1.17 1.21 2.08 2.52 2.84 3.02 3.53 3.74 3.79 4.53 4.62 4.69 5.98 6.45 7.34 7.74 8.17 8.21 9.05 9.96 10.07 11.66 11.92 12.49 13.17 13.85 14.62 14.85 15.25 15.36 15.71 16.53 16.82 18.50 18.78 18.98 20.37 23.78 27.33 31.38 32.38 32.92 34.23 56.59 59.56 10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

% DUPLICATION TO ELIMINATOR(S)

EXHIBIT 2.4. Merge-Purge Summary Report. Source: San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Reproduced with permission.

60%

47

Selecting Your Audience

TABLE 2.1. Simpliﬁed Representation of a Small Merge-Purge. List 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Merge-Dupes Total

Quantity Before Merge-Purge

Quantity After Merge-Purge

5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 5,000 4,000 4,000 4,000 4,000

3,800 3,900 4,000 4,100 4,200 4,300 4,500 4,600 3,100 3,300 3,500 3,700 3,000 50,000

56,000

mailing, you might mail the names that appeared on three or more lists several weeks after the ﬁrst wave of merge-dupes. In this hypothetical example of a 50,000-piece test mailing, the “merge factor” or “dupe rate” (the percentage of names identiﬁed as duplicates or bad addresses) is 16 percent (9,000 divided by 56,000). In larger quantities, when you’re mailing the full lists and not just small “test panels” of 5,000 names or so, that percentage will go up. (Don’t ask me why. Blame it on statistics.) In such cases, with high merge factors the economics of merge-purge will be favorable for you. Your 50,000-piece test mailing will save you the cost of mailing to 6,000 multiple duplicates and bad addresses. If your cost in the mail is $450 per thousand letters, that’s a savings of $2,700—far more than you’ll pay for the mergepurge. Of course, you might argue that you never had any intention of mailing to more than 50,000 individuals, but the truth is, you’re getting the beneﬁt of mailing to 56,000. In much larger quantities, if the merge factor is still high, the advantage might be even greater, since merge-purge costs fall more rapidly than most other mailing costs as quantities increase. The merge-purge is just one of those many details that can make or break a donor acquisition mailing. As you suspect, no doubt, there are comparable factors that determine the outcome of a resolicitation mailing. By far the most signiﬁcant of those factors is segmentation.

48

Revolution in the Mailbox

Segmenting Your Donor File for Resolicitation Mailings To appreciate why segmentation is so very important, print out a portion of your donor ﬁle that will show, name by name, the amounts and dates of the gifts you’ve received from your donors over, say, the past ﬁve years. A glance will make it very clear to you (if it isn’t already) that some donors are more equal than others. You’ll see a few who’ve given unusually large gifts, others who’ve given many small ones, and yet others who used to give but haven’t done so during the past year or two. This wide variation in donor behavior, which is inevitable in any sizable population, is the underlying reality of segmentation—the process whereby we slice and dice a donor list into subgroups or segments. The purpose is to boost fundraising results by treating each segment in a manner consistent with its behavior— investing more time, effort, and money in resoliciting the most responsive donors and much less in appealing to those who have proven least responsive. In fundraising, four principal criteria are used to deﬁne these segments: 1. Recency: Based on the last date on which a donor has contributed to your organization and usually measured in chunks. Donors whose last gift was received during the past six months, say, form one segment. Those whose last gift was received between seven and twelve months ago form another, and so forth. 2. Frequency: The number of gifts received from a donor during a particular period of time (sometimes one year, sometimes two or three). Measuring frequency, we usually distinguish between one-time donors (1x), two-time donors (2x), three-time donors (3x), and donors of four or more gifts (4x+). 3. Monetary amount: Often deﬁned as either the highest previous contribution (HPC) received during the donor’s entire history (or sometimes during a limited number of years) or as the last or most recent contribution (MRC). Some nonproﬁts may instead measure donors’ cumulative giving, either in the course of the current year or over a lifetime of giving. 4. Source or channel: The means by which a donor’s ﬁrst gift (or most frequent gifts) has come to the organization. This criterion permits us to distinguish among direct-mail-acquired, telephone-acquired, and event-acquired donors, and donors from other sources. The distinction can be extremely signiﬁcant, because donors who are accustomed to one such channel may be quite unresponsive to appeals they receive through other channels. Combining these four criteria, we are able to identify those among an organization’s donors who are the most responsive and those who are least so. A moment’s thought will make clear that donors whose gifts are generous and who have con-

49

Selecting Your Audience

tributed both frequently and recently are likely to be the most responsive to subsequent appeals. By contrast, those who have contributed only tiny amounts and on only rare occasions, the last of which was more than two years ago, are least likely to respond to renewed appeals. By applying a fourth criterion—the source or channel of giving—we might further narrow down the target population to include in a direct mail resolicitation appeal, eliminating event donors, for example, as they haven’t established a history of responding to appeals through the mail. For a stylized representation of this approach to segmentation, see Figure 2.2. As you can see, the very best donors cluster in the top near corner: they have frequently given generous gifts, and at least one of those gifts has been received in the last three months. The quality of the list diminishes as you move outward from that corner in any direction. To see just how dramatically different the results can be from one segment to another, see Exhibit 2.5, which depicts the results from a resolicitation mailing. Most of the differences you see (in the rate of response to the mailing and in the amount of the average gift) are the result of the innate behavioral differences of the donor segments themselves. But those differences are exaggerated, because the

FIGURE 2.2. Three-Dimensional Representation of a Simple List Segmentation Plan.

GIFT LEVEL

37+ ths Mon

3 hs ont $1 M ,00 0 5+

1

Recency, frequency, and gift level define donor segments.

RE

C

EN

C

Y

$1 0 FRE

NCY

QUE

50

Revolution in the Mailbox

Bread for the World—Project 60–83 Year-End Thank You—Ornament

May 22, 2003

Project type: Special Appeal

Quantity:

Mail date:

Budgeted cost: $40,660

Projected revenue: $75,000

Final cost:

Revenue to date: $191,598

November 29, 2002

Returns thru: May 12, 2003 (114 days)

Segment

Quantity

Cost per piece

15,417

$35,805

Total gifts

Pct resp

Total revenue

Avg gift

Rev per piece

Highest Previous Gift $1,000+

497

2.48

51

10.26%

100,710 1,974.70

202.64

$500–999

546

2.42

52

9.52%

11,416

219.53

20.91

$250–499

969

2.38

68

7.01%

11,615

170.80

11.99

$100–249

6,085

2.35

415

6.82%

34,172

82.34

5.62

$50–99

7,320

2.26

344

44.69%

14,048

40.83

1.92

576

2.36

24

4.16%

57,935 2,413.95

100.58

7–12 months

7,507

2.32

484

6.44%

73,689

152.25

9.82

0–6 months

6,806

2.32

411

6.03%

39,782

96.79

5.85

528

2.29

11

2.08%

555

50.45

1.05

3+

13,902

2.32

859

6.17%

166,115

193.38

11.95

2x

719

2.33

40

5.56%

3,380

84.50

4.70

1x

796

2.35

31

3.89%

2,466

79.54

3.10

19,637

236.58

Most Recent Gift 13–18 months

19–24 months Giving Frequency

Miscellaneous Misc Project Totals

0

83

15,417

2.32

1,013

6.57%

191,598

189.13

12.42

Hi-$ Core

15,414

2.32

930

6.03%

171,961

184.90

11.16

Lo-$ Core

3

2.26

0

Core Donor Analysis 0

Copyright © 2003 Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc.

EXHIBIT 2.5. Flashcount for a Special Appeal Mailing (page 1 of 10 pages). Source: Bread for the World. Reproduced with permission.

Report format S-1

51

Selecting Your Audience

appeals sent to the most responsive segment were “personalized” (that is, they contained the donors’ individual names and addresses), and they were mailed via ﬁrstclass postage. Appeals mailed to the less responsive segments went via bulk mail.

••• OK. Now that you’ve got a sense of how your donor ﬁle may be segmented to maximize your fundraising results and how you can choose lists for donor or member acquisition mailings, it’s time to turn to the process of preparing your initial test mailing. That’s the subject of the following chapter.

3 Preparing Your Test Mailing

L

et’s be optimistic. We’ll assume that the chair of your board’s ﬁnance committee hasn’t vetoed your plan to explore direct mail fundraising. In fact, she’s helped you persuade other board members and your senior staff that the great potential in direct mail is worth the risk and the investment, even if you have to wait for several years to enjoy the payoff. You’ve budgeted the funds for a test mailing, obtained promises from board members of substantial additional capital if the test is successful, and contracted with a consultant who will work with you to develop the test package, acquire mailing lists, and manage the testing effort on your behalf. Now, let’s make sure we see eye-to-eye on some of the basic terms and premises of direct mail fundraising.

What Makes Direct Mail Work—or Fail You, as the leader of your organization, are the most important ingredient in your direct mail program, not so much because of your management or marketing skills but because of the quality of your leadership. Over time, the perception people have of you and your work will account for at least half the credit (or blame) for the success or failure of your direct mail fundraising efforts. Your organization’s record and the credibility and power of your message, the ties of your work to issues of broad public concern, how much publicity you get, and how good it is—all these factors will help determine how well you do in the mails. But they’re only half the story.

53

54

Revolution in the Mailbox

Several other factors—ingredients you and your consultants can control—will greatly inﬂuence the results of your efforts to raise money through direct mail. Together, these controllable factors are about equal in impact to the leadership, reputation, and programmatic assets that you bring to the program. If the half that’s controllable is viewed as a pie, the pieces or segments of the pie would be (1) list selection, (2) the offer, (3) format, (4) copywriting, (5) design, and (6) timing. Each topic is discussed in turn. 1. List selection. As I note in Chapter One, this is far and away the most important controllable ingredient of a successful direct mail fundraising program; call it half the pie or about as much as all the other controllable elements combined. The most brilliant appeal for the most dynamic and well-managed organization in the world won’t work at all if mailed to the wrong people. The lists selected for your initial donor acquisition test mailing must accurately reﬂect a cross-section of your potential constituency or “market.” They should be lists that have been proven responsive to similar appeals. To make the right list choices for your mailing, someone will have to put in a great deal of time and effort. It’s difﬁcult to spend too much time selecting the lists. 2. The offer. How we structure the “pitch”—what we ask for and what we tell people they’re going to get in return for their support—is the most important creative element in our work. Like list selection, I included the offer in my list of the ten most important things about direct mail fundraising. Call it 25 percent of the pie. Every package needs to be built around a marketing concept—a simple, straightforward connection between the offer and the market, or intended audience. Before we write a single word of copy, we spend as much time as necessary to ﬁnd the right marketing concept and frame it with the right offer. The right decisions at this stage of development can make copywriting easy and stack the odds in favor of a successful outcome. 3. Format. The size, shape, and color of the envelope, the character of the inserts, the quality of the paper and printing, the appearance and accuracy of the recipient’s name and address, and the extent (or lack) of personalization may all have signiﬁcant bearing on the results. (Personalization is a regrettably inelegant term that signiﬁes that the addressee’s own name, address, or other known individual facts are printed somewhere in the package.) Making the right format choices, especially the size and shape of the package and whether or not to personalize (and if so to what extent), accounts for about 10 percent of the total. All the components of a direct mail package must ﬁt together smoothly into an effective, working whole. Above all, a direct mail package must be not only cost-effective but also credible; the form of the package needs to match its purpose. We use a

55

Preparing Your Test Mailing

very wide variety of formats because every fundraising campaign is unique and requires a unique competitive edge (see Table 3.1). 4. Copywriting. The actual wording of a fundraising appeal is less important than it’s cracked up to be. Typically, the copywriter is responsible for researching the project and the letter-signer, devising the marketing concept, framing the offer, and in many cases for making major design and format suggestions as well; if all this is what is meant by copywriting, the job is absolutely crucial. But the copywriter’s words themselves may not account for more than 5 percent of an appeal’s success or failure. Many people insist that the letter is the single most important element in a direct mail package, and we put a great deal of effort into creating compelling fundraising letters. But there’s more to writing a fundraising package than just creating the letter. We devote great care to the creation of the outer envelope, response device, and all other package elements. Good direct mail copywriting ties together all these pieces with the marketing concept. 5. Design. Once the format is set, the designer’s skill can have inﬂuence on the outcome equal to that of the copywriter, or 5 percent of the total. Bad design can obscure or undercut the best of offers. There are a great many specialized techniques in the direct mail design trade. After years of trial, error, and heartache, typically including brochures too big and envelopes too small, direct mail designers become superbly skilled at putting these techniques to work for their clients. 6. Timing. It would be foolhardy to pretend that timing doesn’t inﬂuence the outcome of a mailing. But timing comes into play in direct mail in two ways, only one of which is controllable. If you have the ill fortune to mail 300,000 donor acquisition letters to the San Francisco Bay Area the day before a major earthquake (as I did), you’ll suffer the consequences of bad timing. (You needn’t take the rap,

TABLE 3.1. Factors That Make Mailings Work—or Fail. Factor

Contribution

Your organization’s record, message, and leadership

50%

List selection (or segmentation)

25%

The “offer”

10%

Format

5%

Design

5%

Copywriting

5%

56

Revolution in the Mailbox

though. I certainly didn’t!) However, if you fail to mail an appeal to your donors sometime during the ﬁnal two months of the year, you’ll surely be leaving money on the table, and it will be your fault. The jury is out on the impact of seasonality on direct mail fundraising results (although it’s difﬁcult to ﬁnd a fundraising mailer who believes it’s advantageous to mail during the depths of summer), but the advantage of mailing resolicitations at year-end is universally recognized, and there’s general agreement that the ﬁrst two months of the calendar year are relatively favorable as well. Taken as a whole, however, timing is a wildcard in the hand you’re dealt when you launch a direct mail appeal. There’s no point in assigning a percentage to it; it can be all-important or not at all important. Now that all that’s straight, you’re ready to start. What’s the ﬁrst thing to do now? Think. Because you’re going to need a Big Idea.

Your Marketing Concept The marketing concept is the idea that pulls all the elements together—lists, offer, and signer—and ties them up with a bow. Direct mail fundraising is a form of marketing, and obtaining each individual contribution is a matter of closing a sale. Your “sales”—the monetary lifeblood of your organization—may sharply rise or fall as you succeed or fail in conceptualizing a marketing proposition that motivates your members, donors, or prospects. Keep this fundamental principle in mind:

Each of your mailings requires a unique marketing concept. Every mailing and every marketing concept must ﬁt into an overall marketing strategy.

If it makes you uncomfortable to use the language of marketing, you might think in terms of creative concepts or try an altogether different way of looking at the matter. Think about meeting donors’ needs and solving their problems. Then your marketing concept might be thought of as the short form of a contract between you and your donors. Your donors have to get something in return from you. Although their motives for contributing to your work may seem to be uncomplicated altruism, the act of giving money reﬂects deeply held values and beliefs and responds to inner drives for acceptance, for belonging, for feeling useful and effective, and for propagating their values and beliefs. (See my book, How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters [2001], for an analysis of these and other factors that motivate donors to give.) These powerful impulses create expectations that are dangerous to ignore. Your

Preparing Your Test Mailing

marketing concept needs to address some of these deep-seated needs in an explicit and meaningful way. Ask yourself what satisfaction a donor will receive from making a contribution to your organization. It might derive from any—or many—of the following: • • • • • • • • • •

“Doing something” about a critical problem, if only to protest or to take a stand Associating with a famous and noteworthy person Getting back at the corrupt or the unjust Belonging—as a member, friend, or supporter Speaking one’s mind or offering an opinion Gaining access to inside information Learning about a complex problem or issue Being protected from the destruction of cherished values and beliefs Preserving one’s worldview Gaining a personal connection to another individual who possesses an emotional, passionate involvement in some meaningful dimension of life • Releasing emotional tension caused by a life-threatening situation, a critical emergency, or an ethical dilemma A marketing concept won’t work unless it can be expressed in a single sentence (although that sentence may be godawful complicated). To give you a sense of what I mean, here are four examples: 1. As one who appreciates the ﬁner things in life, you will cherish for many years to come each magniﬁcent issue of our bimonthly magazine on the visual arts, which you’ll receive free of charge as a Charter Member of the Museum with a contribution of $45, $75, $150, or more, and you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that your gift will help us to showcase the exciting new work of emerging artists in our region. 2. By displaying the free stickers I’m sending you, signing the enclosed Protest Petition, and sending a tax-deductible gift of $25, $50, $100 or more to the Coalition, you will join thousands of other animal lovers in America who are committed to stopping once and for all the shameful and short-sighted murder of sea mammals. 3. As a former U.S. diplomat with ﬁrsthand experience in Third World hotspots, I am writing you and a few other distinguished Americans who have demonstrated a commitment to world peace, to ask you to join me as a Sponsor of the Institute’s innovative new conﬂict-resolution program with a tax-deductible gift of $1,000.

57

58

Revolution in the Mailbox

4. Your renewal gift of as little as $25 to help house America’s homeless children will buy $50 or more worth of lumber and tools, because it will be matched dollar for dollar by an anonymous donor through the Center’s highly successful Matching Gift Program—so you’ll get double the satisfaction from your act of generosity. Note that each of these marketing concepts makes clear whom you’re writing, what you want from them, why you need money, and what you’re offering in return. A fully developed marketing concept must include all four of these elements. (Please note that I don’t mean to suggest the overcooked prose in any of the examples would actually appear as-is in any fundraising package; they’re simply summaries of marketing concepts.) In each of the examples, the organization has clariﬁed precisely what it wants from the donor—a particular sum of money and possibly other things as well— and what the donor will receive in return (although that may be implied or intangible). The marketing concept makes the connection between the signer of the appeal and the recipient, in recognition of the reality that the relationship will satisfy not only your organization’s needs but the donor’s needs as well. Decide at the outset what you’ve got to “sell” and who you think will “buy” it. What you offer may be largely, or even exclusively, intangible, but even intangible beneﬁts must be made explicit. This task is akin to the fundamental challenge faced by any dynamic enterprise, whether nonproﬁt or commercial: ﬁguring out what business you’re really in. That may not be at all obvious. It may take considerable research and careful thought. But it’s important you get it right. Consider the four organizations cited in the foregoing examples: 1. In the eyes of the general public and in budgetary terms, the Museum’s principal activity—the business it’s in—may actually be to publish a bimonthly magazine on the visual arts, despite the fact that the Museum’s board may consider its mission to be showcasing young local artists. The marketing concept rightfully focuses on the magazine. 2. The Coalition’s lobbying campaign about the murder of sea mammals may require more funds and more staff time than the public education program that its strategic plan identiﬁes as its primary mission. It may make more sense to say that the Coalition is in the business of inﬂuencing policymakers, not educating the general public. The Protest Petition highlighted in the marketing concept reﬂects this reality. 3. The Institute’s “innovative new conﬂict-resolution program,” envisioned as the centerpiece of its long-term strategy, may be less signiﬁcant than its effort

Preparing Your Test Mailing

to recruit hundreds of prominent American citizens as sponsors. The Institute may actually be in the business of organizing, lobbying, or doing public relations, not conﬂict resolution. It’s appropriate that the marketing concept emphasize the many nonmonetary contributions sponsors make to the Institute. 4. Because of its focus on the needs of homeless families, the housing construction program instituted by the Center may be less important than the social services provided by Center staff. Thus the Center’s marketing concept legitimately focuses on children and on donors’ satisfaction at helping other people. Unlike some other forms of advertising, direct mail fundraising is rarely subtle. When it is, its subtlety is simply and economically expressed. You have about four seconds for the recipient to decide whether to open your appeal. Once she’s opened it, you may have another minute or two to involve her in reading the letter and to begin answering her many skeptical questions. Unless you want to lose her from the outset, you’d better be prepared to hit her over the head with a simple, straightforward proposition that’s clear from beginning to end. Your principal task is to motivate the recipients of your appeals to act in a particular way—to reach for their checkbooks right away. In such circumstances, subtlety rarely works. The very best direct mail packages reﬂect the marketing concept on every sheet of paper, from the outer envelope through the letter and supplementary enclosures to the response device (often called a coupon or reply device). Even the reply envelope won’t escape unscathed if you think your concept all the way through from beginning to end. (In an emergency appeal, for example, you might print the name of the campaign or the word “Emergency” in the upper-left-hand corner of the reply envelope.) Effective outer-envelope teaser copy will draw the recipient directly into the package in a straight line to the heart of the marketing concept. For example, a teaser might consist of brief copy along any of the following lines: • • • • • •

Special Report to Members Here’s something you can do RIGHT NOW about [ﬁll-in-the-blank] Annual Renewal Enclosed [ﬁll-in-the-blank] endangered! Please help us protect them! You have been nominated for a leadership role. National [ﬁll-in-the-blank] Survey Enclosed. Please return within 10 days.

An effective teaser helps guide the reader along the way to the end of the process: sending a gift. But if the “end” is a check that arrives in the mail, the

59

60

Revolution in the Mailbox

“beginning” is the market itself: that group of individuals to whom you’re mailing your letter. No direct mail marketing concept will work unless it’s ﬁrmly grounded in an understanding of the list or lists you use.

The Initial Test Mailing As the very ﬁrst step in a planned campaign to establish a broad ﬁnancial base for your organization, my colleagues and I normally conduct a donor acquisition or prospect test mailing. Although the scope of initial tests varies from as few as 2,000 letters to as many as 500,000, we typically begin with a mailing of between 30,000 and 100,000 packages. Usually, a test mailing will involve from one to three different fundraising letters, each with its own marketing concept. The character and contents of the packages we mail may vary considerably, but they all share at least one common feature: some mechanism to identify each resulting gift by its source. To study the results of the mailing, we have to distinguish among the returns from different lists and from different package versions (if more than one is mailed). Normally, this mechanism is a “keycode”—an alphanumeric symbol identifying the package and the list that correspond to each response we receive. For example, the keycode 620218 might signify a response to the 18th list and the second of two packages in mailing number 62. Coding mechanisms of this sort allow us to test in what the more presumptuous direct mail specialists call a “rigorous, scientiﬁc manner.” The goal of the initial test mailing is to determine your organization’s potential to sustain a cost-effective, broad-based, direct mail prospecting program through which you can build a substantial list of responsive donors. The speciﬁc objectives are typically as follows: • To test at least six and perhaps as many as thirty lists from several different “markets” or constituencies for their potential to yield acceptable returns • To produce donations over the ﬁrst few months that recover a substantial portion of the cost of the test • To generate hundreds of new donors, members, or subscribers • To produce at least one marketing concept and package design that will be the basis for subsequent resolicitation and prospecting mailings—which is most important of all for the future of your direct mail fundraising program A typical initial test mailing at 2003 prices costs from $35,000 to $80,000 (including all production and mailing costs as well as the consultant’s fees). The average cost of a 50,000-piece test of one package was $30,000 to $45,000. Major cost variables include the number of different “packages” employed, the number of letters mailed, the consultant’s fees, the quality of printing, the postage rate, and

61

Preparing Your Test Mailing

the technology used to print, address, and process the mailing. Receiving and processing responses, banking the money, and updating the donor list entail a modest additional cost. See Exhibit 3.1, which illustrates a budget for a typical 50,000-piece initial test mailing. It’s always difﬁcult, at best, to estimate the returns from an initial test mailing, but it’s rarely prudent to assume it will recover more than two-thirds of its cost, and successful tests sometimes return only one-third. We’ve occasionally conducted proﬁtable test mailings, but I’m always loath to predict that outcome from an initial test. When starting a direct mail fundraising program from scratch, the management and creative fees can constitute a substantial overhead and raise the unit cost of the initial mailing. What you spend on the test mailing constitutes an investment in the possibility of a long-term development program.

ACQUISITION TEST MAILING Prepared by Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc. for GOODWORKS Acquisition mailing #66-01 Letters to mail, budget:

50,000

Letters mailed, actual:

50,000

FINAL BUDGET

List rentals and exchanges Merge-purge Printing Personalization and letter

Budgeted Cost per 1,000

Budgeted Cost

$100.00

$5,000.00

Percentage of Total 15.6

17.00

850.00

2.7

138.00

6,900.00

21.6

30.00

1,500.00

4.7

150.00

7,500.00

23.4

Copywriting

6,500.00

20.3

Design and typesetting

1,250.00

3.9

Postage

Production management Mailing fee Shipping and miscellaneous TOTAL COSTS

25.00

1,000.00

3.1

1,250.00

3.9

250.00

0.8

$32,000.00

100.0

EXHIBIT 3.1. Budget for a Typical 50,000-Piece Initial Test Mailing.

62

Revolution in the Mailbox

Ten to sixteen weeks normally elapse from the time you and your consultant agree to conduct an initial test mailing until the day it’s in the mail. When bulk rate postage is used, the ﬁrst returns are likely to arrive no sooner than ten days after the mail date, and it may be a total of three weeks before you receive signiﬁcant returns. However, we usually prefer to wait for an additional three or four weeks of signiﬁcant returns before drawing even preliminary conclusions about the effectiveness of the mailing. And to get a clear picture of the project—to draw conclusions about which lists might be included in a second, “continuation” mailing—we like to have a full eight to sixteen weeks of returns. In other words, a total of about ﬁve to eight months will elapse from the formal commitment to conduct a test mailing until the results are analyzed. In Table 3.2, you’ll see a model timeline for an initial direct mail fundraising test. In some cases, the timetable for the initial test can be accelerated and results made available much sooner, but that’s not always advisable. Both creative development and list acquisition are complicated and time-consuming processes, often surprisingly so. Devising an effective marketing concept normally takes concentration and time. List brokers and computer service bureaus have timetables, procedures, and priorities of their own; so do printers and “lettershops” (where the individual components of your mailing will be collated, inserted, and packaged for the post ofﬁce). It’s risky to speed up the people who perform these vital services. Another of the ways corners can be cut (with uncertain effect) is to eliminate the merge-purge—the step in the process that reduces the number of duplicate appeals.

Choose the Right Signer For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, at least one-third of the initial test mailings we’ve helped to launch over the years have been delayed—sometimes for more than a year—while the executive director or the board chair chased after the supposedly perfect signatory. It’s not worth the wait. In fact, you should immediately rule out the following three persons as prospective signers for your direct mail donor acquisition letter: 1. That Hollywood star you cornered at somebody else’s fundraiser, who told you then he’d really love to help you out 2. The famous novelist who went to college with the chair of your board and who could probably help punch up the letter a little bit, too (and maybe even write it herself) 3. That college professor who’s a world-renowned expert in the issue your group is addressing and is well known to all forty-ﬁve people in his ﬁeld That famous novelist, actor, or expert may have the name recognition to get an envelope opened, but will anyone be convinced she knows what she’s talking

63

Preparing Your Test Mailing

TABLE 3.2. Timeline for an Acquisition Test Mailing. Time

Action

Notes

7 weeks before maildate

Let list broker know that a mailing is scheduled.

Send a sample of mailing, prior results if available, lists to begin clearing. You’ll need to have at least one of the packages written and approved at this stage so that the prospective lists can see what you’re sending out. The broker will have some suggestions for tests. Give two weeks for lists to clear.

5 weeks before maildate

Order lists after sending a list plan to client for approval.

Allow two weeks for lists to be delivered to merge-purge house.

3 weeks before maildate

All copy should be ﬁnalized and sent to designer for art.

19 days before maildate

List should be “cut” (merge instructions to data management house completed).

2 weeks before maildate

Art should be ﬁnalized and approved and sent to printer.

13 days before maildate

Client sends house ﬁle to data management house for suppression.

10 days before maildate

Merged list should be shipped to printer on a Friday for Monday arrival.

7 days before maildate

List arrives for personalization and package preparation.

Maildate

All packages “drop.” Remember, with bulk-rate nonproﬁt postage, the USPS has eleven days to process your mailing and deliver it to your prospective donors.

3 weeks after maildate

Multi-buyers (names that appear on two or more of the lists you rented) drop.

Merge takes 7 days, 9 with a national change of address (COA).

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about? Is she genuinely involved in your issue, preferably in your organization as a long-time board member or volunteer? Is her image such that she’ll be taken seriously? What will she say if someone asks her a question about you on a TV talk show? And is she really widely known among the general public and not just to a narrow audience? Name recognition is easily overestimated, and it may not last. For a successful direct mail fundraising program, the person who signs your appeal needs to be prepared for the long haul, too. Does she understand that if the letter works well, you need to mail it again and again to achieve economies of scale? Or will she inform you after you’ve printed her name on 250,000 envelopes for the next mailing that she’s decided not to allow you to use her name anymore? (Yes, you guessed it: this actually happened to me.) Now, how about copy approval? Is that Hollywood star of yours available to review the draft of the letter, or is he on location in Tashkent for the next four months and reachable only by camel train? Will his agent, manager, or assistant actually show him your letter? Once the copy reaches him, will he declare dogmatically that he won’t sign anything longer than one page? Will he insist on rewriting the letter because it doesn’t ﬁt his image to ask directly for money? Will he refuse to allow you to include any references to his own, relevant experiences because “that’s too personal”? Will he sit indecisively on the text without responding to your phone calls, while the maildate for your test slips ever farther into the dim recesses of the future? Lest these problems sound farfetched, I hereby afﬁrm that I have encountered every single one of them at least once, and in some cases ﬁve or six times, within the past two decades. This experience has helped lead me to the conclusion that the chief executive of your organization is probably the very best signatory for your donor acquisition letter. After all, who can more credibly tell your story than you? A famous name alone is no guarantee of good response for a direct mail appeal. Time and again, I’ve seen appeals signed by Hollywood stars or celebrated authors outclassed by comparable letters mailed over the signatures of unknown, unsung staff or board members. Staff signatures don’t seem to work as well in politics as they do for nonproﬁt groups. Generally, it’s essential that the candidate sign fundraising appeals. However, sometimes the campaign manager or fundraising chair may be a stronger signatory than even the most famous political candidate. In all cases, the key is credibility. If someone else can tell your story more credibly than you—someone with good name recognition to boot—you may be well advised to take a back seat. If you do, just be sure the signatory you’ve selected has really bought into the process and won’t cause more trouble than he’s worth. And lest you’re tempted, out of insecurity, a need to compromise, or other motives to cosign your letter with a second person who will lend authority to the appeal, keep this in mind:

Preparing Your Test Mailing

A direct mail fundraising appeal is not a manifesto. It’s a one-to-one communication—a letter from one person to another, written in the ﬁrst person singular and addressed in the second person singular. Its success requires an emotional bond between the two. Only one person can sign a fundraising letter.

Whatever individual can write most convincingly and emotionally about your work is the best person to sign your appeal.

Mastering Design and Production It’s all too easy to get carried away with the fun of crafting a marketing concept, writing copy, and selecting lists and forget that somebody’s actually got to get your appeal printed and in the mail. This is not as easy as it may sound. There may be as many as two or three dozen organizations that participate in one way or another in the production process, and someone needs to monitor their work. Here are the players in the production of a typical direct mail donor acquisition mailing: • The U.S. Postal Service, which lays down stringent rules and regulations for direct mail format and design and requires a signiﬁcant amount of paperwork from every nonproﬁt mailer—all of which must be in good order before the mailing may be printed. Naturally, the postal service plays the central role in distributing the mailing as well, and its schedules need to be taken into account when planning a mailing. (For example, the production manager must build extra slack into the schedule during the ﬁnal weeks of the year, when the volume of mail is at its peak.) • The list broker, who coaches you on list selection, “clears” the lists (that is, secures permission from list owners for you to mail), and then “orders” the lists you ultimately decide to mail (that is, sends instructions to the list owners’ service bureaus or data processing departments to supply copies of the appropriate portion of each list). • The list owners or their service bureaus—perhaps several dozen of them in a large mailing—each of which must “fulﬁll” the list broker’s orders and deliver the correct number and selection of names to be merge-purged. • The merge-purge house or service bureau, which must assemble and merge the lists, converting them to its standard format if necessary, and run the mergepurge operation, forwarding the “output” to be used to address and keycode the mailing. • The designer, who must ﬁnd the most effective way to lay out the copy and prepare artwork for the printers, following both the project budget and any

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design speciﬁcations laid down either by the copywriter or by the production manager. • The printers, often including at least two companies (one to print the ﬂat components of the package, the other a specialist in printing envelopes), which are responsible for delivering ﬁnished material to be collated and assembled at the same time as the merge-purge output arrives. (From time to time, when special operations such as die-cuts or binding are involved, there may be a third or fourth company involved as well.) • The lettershop, where the package elements are stuffed and addressed and postage afﬁxed, if necessary. (Occasionally, this involves two steps using different vendors, one to print the names, addresses, and other personalized data on the printed material, the other to collate and assemble the package.) As you might imagine, all this scattered activity can present a daunting management challenge. The production manager, whether on your in-house staff, employed by your consulting ﬁrm, or working freelance by contract, must be an extremely competent manager. To get a mailing out on time requires careful advance planning and an almost obsessive effort to stick to the schedule.

The Best Time to Mail Your Appeal “The best time to mail your appeal is when you’ve got it printed and there’s enough postage in your account.” When my direct mail mentor gave that answer to an earnest question I’d asked about seasonal inﬂuences on direct mail fundraising, I didn’t know whether to be puzzled or annoyed. Then came ﬁve or six years during which I watched appeals be delayed by red tape, procrastination, reluctant funders, screwups in the postal system, and computer crashes, as well as arguments about seasonality. Finally, several dozen clients later, I understood at last:

If you’re waiting for the perfect time to mail, your letters may never make it to the mailbox. And if there’s any key to success in direct mail fundraising, it’s this: you have to mail, and mail, and mail some more.

Yes, there are seasonal inﬂuences on direct mail fundraising, just as there are on most other forms of marketing. A seasonality study conducted by a leading list brokerage ﬁrm showed that in one twelve-month period an estimated 20 percent of all fundraising appeals went into the mails in November, whereas 14 percent were mailed in August and nearly 12 percent in February. But those ﬁgures

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change greatly over time, according to the same study. My agency’s own testing has shown January and August to be the most favorable months for prospecting, increasingly so in recent years. Chances are, though, the patterns of seasonality will be different for your organization than they are for others. And unless you’ve got a huge budget for testing, you may never be able to afford the research needed to determine the seasonal patterns that bear on your particular direct mail program. And besides, you can’t possibly mail only during what you think is the “best time.” Some groups limit their prospecting to one or two large mailings per year, presumably in the most favorable months. With sufﬁcient capital, that may well be a defensible donor acquisition strategy. (However, sticking to a single donor acquisition mailing each year virtually eliminates the possibilities of testing package variations or mailing the very best lists more than once annually, and a single, large prospect mailing puts substantial strain on an organization’s cash ﬂow.) Resolicitations are another matter altogether: donor resolicitation is a yearround process. As much as 40 percent of all the funds contributed by mail are donated within the ﬁnal two months of the calendar year and the ﬁrst month of the following year. For most—not all—nonproﬁt organizations, November and December are the best times to seek renewal gifts. But the most successful yearend appeal won’t come close to making up the revenue lost by failing to resolicit your donors during the other ten months of the year. Keep in mind, too, that a month that’s dead time for one group’s fundraising program may be fruitful for another’s. We’ve often found that mailing during months that are generally avoided by large, established charities produces better results for organizations that are less well known. Not everyone can compete with the Sierra Club or the Salvation Army, and you might be unwise to try.

••• Now, please join me in Chapter Four. There, we’ll take a look at the typical contents of a direct mail fundraising package and at some of the issues commonly raised about them.

4 Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package

I

n this chapter, I’ll show you in pictures and words the individual components of a typical direct mail fundraising package. Keep in mind as you examine each of the elements portrayed in this chapter that there is no best or perfect example of any one of them. Every element in a successful direct mail fundraising package is a part of a whole, uniﬁed by a marketing concept. In Part Three, we’ll take an inside look at four years in a particular nonproﬁt direct mail program. There you’ll have an opportunity to examine, page by page, the entire contents of several fundraising packages that were written for one organization in the course of four years of work. Right now, though, let’s take a quick look at what many fundraisers consider the most important element in a direct mail package: the outer envelope.

The Outer Envelope Outer envelopes, otherwise called carrier envelopes or simply carriers or outers, come in a bewildering profusion of shapes, sizes, and colors. Occasionally, direct mail fundraising appeals are packaged without envelopes, in the form of selfmailing brochures or magazines or in such nontraditional formats as “card decks” (which are just about what they sound like they are). But most fundraisers keep coming back to the boring old technique of inserting letters in envelopes because, most of the time, it works better than other formats.

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Direct mail designers, copywriters, and envelope manufacturers wrack their brains for ever newer and more unusual wrappings, in relentless pursuit of the envelope to end all envelopes: one that everyone will open (see Exhibit 4.1). But reality intrudes; through our research, we’ve learned that, despite all these clever machinations to capture their attention, what people really look at ﬁrst is how their names and addresses are spelled!

Postage In its inscrutable wisdom, Congress requires the U.S. Postal Service to offer a wide variety of postal rates and delivery options. Although runaway inﬂation has reduced the advantage (and federal budget cutting has almost entirely eliminated it), slightly lower rates are still available to most nonproﬁt organizations. The very cheapest rate applies to huge mailings that are presorted into bundles for individual lettercarriers, but discounts are also available on ﬁrst-class postage if you presort. There are also several format options: stamps, metered postage, and preprinted postal “indicia.” Choosing among them is not a trivial matter, because any one may signiﬁcantly affect a mailing’s results. It’s tempting to use the least expensive postage, but here’s another one of those counterintuitive aspects of direct mail: the opposite is often true. We make extensive use of ﬁrst-class postage because it gets there faster and more reliably, because it’s forwardable, because it gets more envelopes opened, and, most of all, because research sometimes shows that ﬁrst-class postage is more costeffective than cheaper postal rates. Ultimately, you usually get just what you pay for (see Exhibit 4.2).

The Letter If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it ten thousand times: “Why do you insist on sending out these godawful four-page letters? I never write such long letters, and I’m sure I’d never read them!” Well, let’s review the facts: (1) By testing this proposition again and again, we know that, most of the time, longer letters generate more donations than shorter ones, and (2) studies show that lots of people actually do read four-page fundraising letters; in fact, many people even like getting them. This continues to be true even now, after years of overﬂowing mailboxes and even though you may automatically throw them into the trash. Ultimately, direct mail fundraising doesn’t work on theory or intuition but on empirical fact. Fundraising letters are almost as varied as the envelopes they’re mailed in. But they’re not much like business or personal letters, or even like advertising copy. Direct mail fundraising follows rules and rhythms of its own.

Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package

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EXHIBIT 4.1. Outer Envelopes from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages. Sources: Save-the-Redwoods League, reproduced with permission; National Council of La Raza, reproduced with permission; Feingold Senate Committee, reproduced with permission.

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EXHIBIT 4.2. Postage Options Used in Direct Mail Fundraising. Sources: National Council of La Raza. Reproduced with permission.

Keep in mind, too, that the typical direct mail donor is a well-educated, churchgoing woman in her sixties. She may be one or even two generations older than the nonproﬁt staff members who raise objections to long letters—and she just might have different reading habits! A successful appeal letter is likely to include ﬁve essential ingredients: 1. It establishes a one-on-one linkage or identiﬁcation between the letter-signer and the person to whom the letter is addressed. 2. It presents an offer of an opportunity to participate in your organization (as a subscriber or member, for example, or by supporting some particular program).

Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package

3. It makes a compelling case for the offer. 4. It establishes urgency. 5. It asks for a speciﬁc sum of money. The reason most direct mail letters include these ﬁve ingredients is that testing proves fundraising appeals usually work better if they do. And that, in turn, is why they’re typically long; it’s often hard to tell enough of the story in just one or two pages to motivate a donor to act. To work well, a letter needs to make every reasonable argument for the donor to send money now and to anticipate—and satisfy—every reasonable objection.

The Reply Device A detached, stand-alone reply device or response device or form (occasionally called a donation coupon, though I don’t favor the term) has repeatedly proven to be an indispensable element in fundraising packages, with only rare exceptions. For one thing, using a reply device is the most efﬁcient way for you to obtain the donor’s name and address, which normally appears on a label or direct imprint on the reply device. But there’s an even more important reason we include these devices. Studies show that donors are more likely to respond if they’re given something to do other than just write and return a check. If nothing else, they give donors a chance to correct the spelling of their names and addresses. The reply device is the ﬁrst thing most donors see when they open a fundraising package. Many donors set appeals aside, promising themselves they’ll write checks later; they often keep reply devices but toss out the letters. Many reply devices offer special opportunities for extra involvement: checking boxes, ﬁlling out surveys, signing petitions, or the like. Response rates tend to rise the more such opportunities a package offers, but the average gift often falls at the same time, since many of those who return petitions or surveys will send a dollar or two, presumably to help with “processing,” instead of the larger sums the letter suggests. Involvement devices such as petitions usually aren’t effective in fundraising, however, when they’re added gratuitously such as in a magazine sweepstakes offer; they work best when there’s a credible link with the organization’s strategy. (See Exhibit 4.3.)

The Reply Envelope Direct mail fundraising appeals work best when it’s easy for a donor to respond. This almost always means they’ll include a reply envelope, and most of the time it will be a business reply envelope (BRE) that the donor can mail postage-free without hunting for a stamp. (It will cost your organization $150 to open a business

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Step 1

MEM

BERS

HIP

P TA ACCE

NCE

FORM

EXHIBIT 4.3. Response Devices from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages. Sources: Paciﬁc School of Religion, reproduced with permission; Union of Concerned Scientists, reproduced with permission; Bread for the World, reproduced with permission.

Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package

reply account and another $0.47 to $0.97 per item to process your return mail. To qualify for the lower rate, you must pay another $475 and deposit additional funds to cover the return postage in advance.) But in many circumstances it makes sense to ask donors to afﬁx their own stamps; some organizations obtain higher response when they do. Other times, it’s wise to put a “live stamp”—a real, live ﬁrst-class stamp—on the reply envelope. Only experience and testing can establish the appropriate approach for each mailing.

EXHIBIT 4.4. Reply Envelopes from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages. Sources: National Council of La Raza, reproduced with permission; Save-the-Redwoods League, reproduced with permission; Bread for the World, reproduced with permission.

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The Brochure For some reason (which has always escaped me), many organizations want to include their general brochure in an initial direct mail fundraising test. This is rarely a good idea. The marketing concept at the heart of a fundraising appeal needs to be tightly focused; everything in the package should address that same focus. Even a brochure speciﬁcally designed and written for your direct mail package—one built on the same marketing concept—may not be much better than your general brochure. More often than not, testing shows that informational brochures depress rather than enhance response. They seem to distract donors from the essential task we want them to undertake: writing a check. However, there are exceptions. From time to time, I have had exceptionally good luck with brochures specially written and designed to be included in a special appeal or renewal mailing when those brochures strongly reiterated the ask, effectively reinforcing the message in the letter, not supplementing it. (See Exhibit 4.5, which includes examples plucked more or less at random from my mailbox.)

Front-End Premiums Ask anyone in the advertising business to identify the most powerful word in the English language, and you’re likely to be told the word is free. Wonder no more, then, why so many direct mail fundraising packages come with free stickers, decals, stamps, key chains, address labels, letter-openers, bumper stickers, and other such items. These are so-called front-end premiums, as opposed to back-end premiums, which are sent only in response to gifts from donors. The psychology established by these unsolicited free gifts is not subtle: the operative mechanism is guilt, and it’s no accident that many donors send in a dollar or two in response. But there may be better reasons for you to use front-end premiums; at their best, decals, stamps, and such can also be effective involvement devices that give donors something to do, reinforce the marketing concept, heighten your organization’s visibility, and even play a role in your public education program. (See Exhibit 4.6.)

Other Enclosures Some direct mail packages are fattened up with additional enclosures. There are “lift letters” signed by celebrities or experts, which are normally brief and to the point. There are “buckslips”—usually small slips of paper that dramatically illustrate some attractive feature of the offer, such as a free calendar or book in return for gifts above a certain level, or highlight some up-to-the-minute information about the organization’s work. There are news clippings, internal memoranda, budgets,

Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package

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EXHIBIT 4.5. Brochures from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages. Sources: Democrat-Republican brochure, from the New Majority Education Fund, reproduced with permission; Bush brochure, composed and designed by Friends of the Earth and Lewis Direct, reproduced with permission.

and other supporting documents meant to strengthen the letter’s case for supporting your organization. Only methodical testing can establish when these items will improve the results. Often they don’t. The possibilities for enclosures are virtually endless. (See Exhibit 4.7.)

Putting It All Together As you can see, putting a direct mail fundraising package together is not simply a matter of writing a letter and wrapping it up. In fact, the letter is often the last element I write. Rather, the entire package must reﬂect a clearly thought out marketing concept. Once that is ﬁxed in your mind and on paper, you can start with any

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EXHIBIT 4.6. Front-End Premiums from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages. Sources: DSD Management and Fundraising Services created the pets premium for the East Bay SPCA, reproduced with permission; AIDS Project labels from AIDS Project Los Angeles, reproduced with permission; Amnesty International sticker from Amnesty International, reproduced with permission.

element of the package. In most cases, I begin with the reply device, which encapsulates the marketing concept. The outer envelope, which gives donors or prospects their ﬁrst look at your package, bears special consideration and may take a lot of work. Some writers claim they spend a third or more of the time allotted to copywriting and design on the copy for the outer envelope, especially in the case of acquisition packages. An especially clever or provocative teaser, calculated to entice prospects to open the envelope, may be the hardest thing of all to write. But the very biggest challenge is to write outer envelope copy that is fully consistent with everything inside the envelope and leads recipients directly into the marketing concept. All the pieces in a direct mail package must ﬁt together neatly or they’ll confuse rather than motivate. They’ll prompt a response only if you’ve carefully thought through your marketing concept before you start to write. In this chapter, I focused on the contents of donor acquisition packages. In theory, there’s little difference in the contents of acquisition and resolicitation mailings. But in reality, for most nonproﬁts special appeals and renewal packages are

Anatomy of a Direct Mail Fundraising Package

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EXHIBIT 4.7. Other Enclosures from Direct Mail Fundraising Packages. Sources: National Council of La Raza, reproduced with permission; Planned Parenthood Los Angeles, reproduced with permission; TreePeople, reproduced with permission.

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slimmer than those used in most acquisition mailings. Budgetary limitations dictate that in most cases. A typical special appeal for a fair-to-middling-size nonproﬁt organization is likely to consist only of a letter, a response device, and both outer and reply envelopes.

••• Now let’s turn our attention to a few of the enclosures that require a closer look: premiums and involvement devices. That’s the topic we’ll take up in Chapter Five.

5 Premiums and Other Involvement Devices

I

f you think for one minute that you can ever know why a donor chooses to open one of your fundraising letters—even if you ask him—then you’re on the wrong track and have a lot to learn about donor motivation. Chances are, there are both rational and irrational factors at work in every case, and the range of possible explanations is bewilderingly broad. Consider, for example, the following possible reasons: • He feels a deep connection with your organization and will open any envelope you send him, regardless of what you’ve printed on the outside. • He’s bored and hopes to ﬁnd something interesting inside. • Your organization represents a cause in which he has considerable interest. • He thinks your letter comes from another, similar organization he has supported in the past. • The teaser copy you’ve printed on the outer envelope intrigues him. • You mangled the spelling of his name, and he wants to ﬁnd out what jerks could screw it up so badly. • He’s gotten letters from you in the past that he’s never opened, and he ﬁgures it’s about time to ﬁnd out what you’ve got to say.

The list is probably limitless. But even such a short list as this should include at least one other possible explanation:

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He opened your letter because he knows it contains something of value—and it’s free.

Those things of value—the front-end premiums I introduced in the preceding chapter—undoubtedly cause tens of millions of direct mail fundraising letters to be opened every year. Many of the nonproﬁt world’s biggest and most successful direct mail programs have been built on the back of front-end premiums such as name-stickers, calendars, greeting cards, key chains, pencils, pennies, and even books.

The Pros and Cons of Front-End Premiums The simple fact that front-end premiums induce (or help induce) people to open fundraising letters is the key to their widespread use. In a word, they usually increase response. More people open letters containing free gifts, and more people respond. We know that front-end premiums increase the number of responses because we mail packages with and without them and almost invariably see the response rise when they’re included. However, we also know that adding a front-end premium to a direct mail fundraising package typically lowers the average gift mailed in response, sometimes dramatically so. It’s common to ﬁnd lots of small contributions—many as little as a dollar or two, frequently in cash—among the responses to a front-end premium package. Anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that these tiny donations result from the belief of many donors that they’re obligated to pay for what they get (even if the copy clearly states that they’re not). And they mistakenly believe a dollar or two will cover the cost of the premium, no doubt unaware of the reality that processing a single small gift might cost a charity more than the amount they’ve been sent. These two phenomena illustrate the strongest arguments raised both for and against the use of front-end premiums. “They boost response,” say the advocates. “They attract contributions that don’t represent philanthropic motives,” respond the critics. “And you have to send them more premiums to get them to respond again.” The advocates’ argument is self-evident. The critics’ is harder to demonstrate. Some long-term studies have, indeed, shown that donors acquired through premium-based direct mail programs are less loyal and less responsive to subsequent solicitations. Others have shown that there is no discernible difference in performance between donors acquired with premiums and those recruited without them.

Premiums and Other Involvement Devices

In practice, this becomes tantamount to a theological discussion. What it boils down to is this: some fundraisers just don’t like premiums. Others say, “Whatever works.” If you’re like most fundraisers and undecided about which way to turn, here are a few questions to ask yourself and your colleagues when you consider whether to test front-end premiums in your donor acquisition mailings: • Are you planning to test a premium that’s appropriate for your organization— one that relates, at least in some indirect way, to your mission, one that helps educate the public about your cause, or that helps increase your organization’s visibility? • Do you have the staff and systems in place to cope with a larger than normal number of responses, including many very small gifts, some of them in cash? • Do you have—or are you planning to build—a very large donor ﬁle, so that it will be cost-effective for you to resolicit donors of very small sums? (Production and mailing costs may be too high for you to send appeals to $5 or $10 donors unless you can realize substantial economies of scale, as those donors are unlikely to send you more than another $5 or $10.) • Is the look and feel of the premium-based package you’re considering consistent with the public image of your organization? Many—by no means all— premium-based packages are decidedly downscale in appearance. For some nonproﬁts, this may pose a disadvantage. While you stew on these troublesome questions, consider for a moment another potential application of premiums in direct mail fundraising: the back-end premium.

Back-End Premiums You’ve probably encountered back-end premiums dozens of times as you sort through your mail. The give-away usually reads something like this: “FREE with your membership gift of $25 or more.” The offer of a back-end premium might be made in any one or several of the following ways: • • • • •

In a teaser on the outer envelope On the response device In the text of the letter In a postscript On a buckslip (see Chapter Four)

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A back-end premium may be a book, a backpack, a bauble, or any one of thousands of other possible rewards for sending a gift. Although it’s important that a front-end premium be appropriate to the organization that sends it, it’s even more vital that a back-end premium resonate with the nonproﬁt’s mission or character. Front-end premiums are, necessarily, inexpensive items obviously calculated to encourage readers to respond. Back-end premiums, which are often signiﬁcantly more expensive, more clearly reﬂect on the organization. An environmental organization can appropriately send new members a fannypack, because environmental donors are presumably more interested in the outdoors than the general public is. A cancer research organization would probably raise eyebrows if it sent a fanny-pack. There’s no reason to believe that donors to a cancer research organization would have any special love for the outdoors. More important, one of its donors might well think it’s curious (or objectionable) if a medical research group spent money on fanny-packs. However, prospective donors to either organization might not think twice if they received a front-end set of namelabels in a membership invitation package. Cost is always a consideration with premiums. A premium must make a package more cost-effective. The added cost it represents needs to be returned— ideally, many times over—in additional revenue from the mailing. It’s simple to determine whether a front-end premium works: all you need to do is to compare the acquisition cost with and without it. Back-end premiums sometimes present a bigger challenge. Consider, for example, a direct mail campaign in which a group we’ll call The Coalition offers a free book, written by its executive director, as an incentive for donors to contribute $50 or more. The book costs The Coalition $5 to produce and ship, and repeated testing makes it clear that the offer increases the average gift per donor by $4. Obviously, a straightforward reading of the numbers suggests that the book offer is not cost-effective. Any time I have to pay $5 for a $4 value, I’ll question the purchase, as will you. But think about the following facts before you reach a conclusion: • Overall, the book offer raised the average gift from $29 to $33. But it doubled the number of $50 donors. And experience shows that donors whose ﬁrst gift is $50 or higher are substantially more responsive and loyal than donors who ﬁrst contribute $25 or $30. • Those $50 donors who received (and may have read) the executive director’s book have been positively reinforced in their support for The Coalition. Even if the book just sits on a shelf, it’s an enduring reminder of the donor’s connection with the organization. And there’s no way to gauge the value of that!

Premiums and Other Involvement Devices

How, then, do you evaluate the effectiveness of the back-end premium? In this hypothetical case, it’s a judgment call. As a fundraiser focused on building long-term relationships with donors, my judgment would err on the side of the premium.

Donor Involvement Devices There is something “involving” about almost every premium. When I pick up a set of name-labels and turn them over in my hands, I’m involved, just as I would be when I ﬁnger a key chain, a bookmark, a calendar, or almost any other front-end premium that presents me with an opportunity for a tactile experience. When I look forward with anticipation to receiving The Coalition’s free book, I’m involved. In either case, there’s a new dimension added to my relationship with the organization that goes beyond the level, because I have transcended the role of passive reader and become actively involved. However, there are many other ways to involve donors in a direct mail fundraising package. These include surveys, petitions, quizzes, postcards, and other devices that require the reader to take some action in support of the organization or its mission beyond sending a contribution. As with front-end premiums, the result is typically to raise the rate of response and to lower the average gift. However, there’s an added beneﬁt that comes from the use of such involvement devices: the respondents are usually good prospects for donor acquisition the second—or even the third—time around. It’s not unusual for such lists of “warm prospects” to respond at a rate two or three times that of the average donor on a prospect list. Given the continuing challenge of ﬁnding responsive donor acquisition lists, this can be a decided advantage. Under the right circumstances, premiums and other involvement devices can enhance a direct mail fundraising program. But the circumstances aren’t always right. Sometimes the organization’s strategy doesn’t lend itself to such an approach.

Stick to Your Strategy Ponder these two contrasting hypothetical cases.

Case 1 Because the mission of End Injustice Now! is to seek changes in public policy, it’s engaged in extensive grassroots lobbying efforts. The organization must recruit tens or hundreds of thousands of supporters to build pressure on Congress to oppose critical legislation. Its direct mail fundraising program can directly support its mission by including opportunities for donors to act within both acquisition and resolicitation packages.

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Case 2 By contrast, the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra is intent on involving its supporters in quite a different way: by persuading them to attend its concerts as well as to contribute cash contributions. The Symphony’s donor acquisition mail could conceivably include complimentary concert tickets (or discount coupons), but other sorts of involvement devices might distract readers from its core message. In addition, marketing research has clearly demonstrated to the Symphony that both its audience and its donors are upscale. Inexpensive premiums (such as name-stickers, for example) might well detract from the Symphony’s appeal to its prime market.

There is, then, something inherent in the appeal of certain nonproﬁt organizations (or of particular fundraising campaigns) that either lends itself to the use of premiums or does not. But there is another crucial reason premiums or involvement devices may not be suitable for your organization: your fundraising strategy simply may not require them. Let’s say, for example, that your principal goal is to lower your cost of fundraising (that is, to pursue a strategy centered on efﬁciency). Or, to take an even simpler case, there could be a ceiling on fundraising expenses in your budget. Both premiums and involvement devices cost money, of course, and in either of these circumstances it may be important simply to spend less money on fundraising, even at the cost of sacriﬁcing the additional net revenue you might gain from premiumbased mailings. However, if premiums or involvement devices seem to lend themselves well to your fundraising strategy, be careful: you can’t dabble in premiums. The character of your direct mail program (and of your fundraising program as a whole) is likely to be changed by extensive use of premiums. Usually, the most effective way to renew donors acquired through premium-centered direct mail is to offer—you guessed it—more premiums. And if donors become used to participating in your work through involvement devices such as petitions or postcards, they may respond less well if you suddenly decide to eliminate such devices. The use of premiums and involvement devices is not a trivial matter. Use them thoughtfully.

••• Now we’re ready to move on. We’ll assume that you’ve conducted your test mailing and are pondering what to do next. Will you plunge deeper into the world of direct mail fundraising or write off the initial experience as an unfortunate diversion? In the opening section of Chapter Six, which follows, we’ll examine how you may determine the success or failure of your initial test mailing.

6 Building Your Donor Base

I

’ve described the ideal direct mail prospecting program as one that attracts new donors at an acceptable acquisition cost. But what does acceptable mean to you? Take my word for it: the breakeven prospecting that may seem acceptable in the abstract could be impossible for you to attain. You could be making a big mistake to hold yourself to that standard simply because it seems right somehow. Building your donor base will mean a great deal to your organization. It may be worth paying a lot of money to keep your list growing. Your challenge is to ﬁgure out how much it’s worth. In Chapter Seven, we’ll examine several different methods for evaluating the worth of the donors you recruit through prospecting. You may then be able to apply speciﬁc numbers to your donor acquisition program, establishing criteria that relate uniquely to your organization’s strategy and the role you’ve assigned to the direct mail program. In this chapter, we’ll look at the possibilities and the pitfalls of sustaining a direct mail fundraising program over the long term. First, let’s ﬁgure out whether it’s worth trying.

The Difference Between Success and Failure You’ve ﬁnally gotten enough results from your initial test mailing to tell the story, and what they say is absolutely clear and unequivocal: maybe it’s going to work. Here, brieﬂy, is what’s happened. You’ve tested two slightly different versions of one package using samples from ten lists, splitting each of them down the middle. The total cost of this 50,000-piece

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test was $35,000. Your projections show that you’ll receive a total of $22,500, and despite cautionary warnings, your board of directors had been expecting at least $30,000. From this initial test, you’ll gain about 500 donors at an acquisition cost of $25 per donor—a level that is too high for your organization to sustain. (That’s calculated as $35,000 − 22,500 = 12,500 ÷ 500 = $25.) Judging from the latest “ﬂashcounts”—periodic list-by-list reports—one of the two package versions appears to be performing slightly better than the other; a statistical analyst who isn’t too much of a purist would agree that it’s a better bet for the future. It might even produce results as much as 20 percent higher than the other ones, and you’re all convinced, in hindsight, that you could substantially boost the returns even more with several simple changes in the copy. Even with the better of the two existing packages, your mailing broke even on only three of the ten lists. Notably, however, two of those three are very large lists, with substantial potential for further mailing. You project that you’ll be able to recover three-quarters of the costs and fees you might invest in a second, continuation, or rollout mailing of 75,000 pieces. Your more favorable projections are based on using the more successful of the two packages, mailing to substantial numbers of new, yet unmailed names from the three most responsive lists, and making what you believe are improvements in the copy. Also the increased quantity and diminished start-up costs will lower the mailing’s unit cost. As a result, you expect you’ll recover about $22,500 out of $35,000, gaining 1,000 new donors at a cost of $12.50 each. Your capital is limited, and you’re just now beginning to put into place the fundraising programs that will enable you to maximize the value of these donors. Even so, you might reasonably expect to derive at least $20 in net revenue per donor per year on average, so an acquisition cost of $12.50 seems sustainable. However, in a second mailing, you hope to learn enough from further list and package testing to lower that acquisition cost on subsequent mailings to the range of $5 to $8, although there’s no guarantee you can do so. To proceed with a second mailing means either a ﬁght with your board right now or, possibly, a bigger conﬂict further down the line. What do you do? The only way I know to deal with a problem of this sort, which is maddeningly common, is to decide in advance how to deﬁne a “successful” outcome for your direct mail test. There’s no such thing as a workable universal deﬁnition, but here’s a principle to start from:

The criteria that distinguish success from failure must be directly based on your organization’s resources and strategic goals.

Building Your Donor Base

For some organizations, the scenario I’ve sketched is very attractive. A well-capitalized group with an appealing action program and a handful of wealthy major donors might be nuts not to go ahead under these circumstances. So would one that’s seeking to change prevailing attitudes on a matter of broad policy and requires signiﬁcant grassroots participation to do so. In both cases, the circumstances place a premium on building a large donor base. Similarly, an organization committed to a long-range membership growth strategy, with sufﬁcient capital on tap to make it work, might well decide it’s worth paying even $25 per donor. A $25 new-member acquisition cost, corresponding, in the hypothetical case, to returns of only slightly more than 50 cents on the dollar in prospecting, might be well worthwhile for such an organization. They’ll recover their investment within less than a year, given the generous returns they receive from membership dues, special donor appeals, and collateral fundraising efforts that feed off the membership list. By contrast, a narrowly based and underfunded effort to launch a new organization through the mails might wisely decide to leave the ﬁeld with results like those described. The same goes for a well-established charity with a fully staffed development department. For a large organization, the case against direct mail in this scenario is even stronger if this, its ﬁrst foray into direct mail donor acquisition, was a wistful effort to diversify its funding base. (More than once, I’ve seen half-hearted, compromised efforts at direct mail undertaken by cautious organizations that quickly ended because they never were convinced their work lent itself particularly well to the emotional rough-and-tumble of direct mail. Some groups might be better off not trying.) Every organization is unique. Your challenge is to make direct mail work uniquely for you.

How to Choose Lists for the Next Mailing As you set out to select prospect lists for the second mailing in your donor acquisition campaign, you’ll be forced once again to address those strategic considerations that determine the levels of investment and risk acceptable to your organization. To view the sort of projections my colleagues and I use when selecting lists for a rollout mailing, please take a look at Table 6.1. In Table 6.1, I’ve listed the ﬁfteen possible lists you’ve identiﬁed to be used in your continuation mailing: List A through List O. They range in size (“universe”) from 3,000 names to 250,000, with a total universe of one million names. Four months ago, you mailed to ten of them—A through J—so you can project the response rate and average contribution you anticipate from each of them. If you use all ten in your rollout, you’ll be “remailing” four small lists, remailing portions

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TABLE 6.1. List Selection Model for a Hypothetical 150,000-Piece Rollout Mailing. Percent Average Gross List Universe Quantity Response Gift Income A

5,000

5,000

4.0%

$20

$4,000

Cost

Number New Net Cumulative Donors Income Income

$2,000

200

$2,000

Acquisition Cost

$2,000

($10)

B

10,000

10,000

3.5%

18

6,300

4,500

350

1,800

3,800

(5)

C

3,000

3,000

3.0%

18

1,620

1,200

90

420

4,220

(5)

D

15,000

15,000

2.5%

16

6,000

6,750

375

(750)

3,470

2

E

5,000

5,000

2.0%

18

1,800

2,000

100

(200)

3,270

2

F

75,000

25,000

1.8%

20

8,750

11,250

438

(2,500)

770

6

G

150,000

25,000

1.5%

18

6,750

11,250

375

(4,500)

(3,730)

12

H

25,000

12,000

1.3%

16

2,400

4,800

150

(2,400)

(6,130)

16

I

5,000

5,000

1.0%

14

700

2,000

50

(1,300)

(7,430)

26

J

200,000

20,000

0.8%

18

2,700

9,000

150

(6,300)

(13,730)

42

K

150,000

5,000

0.8%

16

600

2,000

38

(1,400)

(15,130)

37

L

25,000

5,000

0.8%

16

600

2,000

38

(1,400)

(16,350)

37

M

52,000

5,000

0.8%

16

600

2,000

38

(1,400)

(17,930)

37

N

30,000

5,000

0.8%

16

600

2,000

38

(1,400)

(19,330)

37

O

250,000

5,000

0.8%

16

600

2,250

38

(1,650)

(20,980)

44

1,000,000

150,000

1.6%

$18

$44,020 $65,000

2,468

($20,980)

($20,980)

$9

of two others, and mailing to additional, yet untouched names on six lists. The other ﬁve lists—K through O—are to be newly tested, and it’s anybody’s guess what will happen when you mail to them; to be conservative, I’ve assumed poor results. In Table 6.1, I’ve ranked the ﬁfteen lists from best-performing to worst in terms of response rate. I’ve calculated the probable results of mailing to what appears from the test results to be the optimum quantity on each list. In practice, my colleagues and I would discount the projected results by up to 20 percent for the sake of caution, but I’ve omitted that step here. To further simplify the picture, I’ve also arbitrarily assumed that you won’t run a merge-purge. For each list, Table 6.1 presents the mailing cost and anticipated gross and net returns, the projected number of new donors, and the acquisition cost for that list. (Costs vary from one list to another because some are available to you only as rentals and others only on exchange.) Under the “Cumulative Income” column, the table shows on each row the cumulative proﬁt or loss of mailing to all the lists down to and including the one on that row.

Building Your Donor Base

For the top ﬁve lists—List A through List E—I anticipate that you would mail to every available name. For most of the others, you’d select only a percentage of the names available. (To “roll out” to all the available names on a large list without repeated testing is a risky proposition.) This points to a total mailing quantity of up to 150,000 packages—only 15 percent of the total number of names available on the ﬁfteen lists. With lists that perform only moderately well at best, it’s often unwise to roll out to the full universe. In the long run, mailing to Lists K through O—the ﬁve test lists—may be the most signiﬁcant aspect of this second mailing. Together they constitute half of the universe for the mailing as a whole. Each consists of at least 25,000 names. List N alone contains 250,000. To succeed with any of the ﬁve will make a meaningful contribution to the success of your direct mail program. Every prospect mailing should include list tests of this sort to explore new markets. You can and should mail more than once to those lists that constitute the core of your donor acquisition program because they work so very well, but there’s a limit to remailing. List testing is never-ending. On the ﬁnal row of the chart, you can see the total and cumulative impact of mailing all ﬁfteen lists in the quantities indicated: a response rate of 1.6 percent and an average gift of $18. With a budget of $65,000 and projected gross revenue of $44,020, the mailing is projected to lose $20,980, acquiring 2,465 new donors at an acquisition cost of $9 per donor. Now here’s where your strategy takes speciﬁc tactical shape. If your strategy requires you to build your donor list as quickly as possible, and you’ve got the money to do so, your best tactical move is to mail all 150,000 names and perhaps more besides. At an acquisition cost of $9, you may feel you’re getting a bargain on nearly 2,500 new donors. Capital permitting, you might opt to mail 50,000 names or more on List G and all 25,000 names on List H. If you’re feeling really lucky, you might also test larger quantities on some of the new test lists. If, however, your strategy requires that you conserve capital or if your cash ﬂow is simply inadequate to the task, you might mail only the top six or seven lists. Using Lists A through F will yield an estimated 1,553 new donors and a net proﬁt of $770. Mailing to 10,000 or 20,000 names on List G will eat up that proﬁt, and more. But you’ll still cut the projected loss in half, and the resulting acquisition cost for the mailing as a whole will be only about $5—a level you might well ﬁnd acceptable. Nearly one-third, or $6,300, of the projected loss for the mailing as a whole will come from List J, and more than one-half from Lists J and G combined. Those two lists, however, represent 350,000 prospective donors—more than one-third of the total universe for this mailing. If you’re following a growth strategy—and

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particularly if workable large lists are few and far between for your program—you have to mail to these and other large lists despite painful losses. Note that you’re projecting a proﬁt on only three of the ﬁfteen lists individually. If you limit your prospect mailing to those three alone, you’ll have a total of only 18,000 names available—a quantity too small to mail cost-effectively. The proﬁts you project on Lists A, B, and C are signiﬁcant only in that you expect them to cancel out the losses on Lists D, E, and F. Even if your strategy is particularly cautious, you’ll be well advised to mail the largest possible quantity that will produce breakeven results for the mailing as a whole. You’ll play out this process of prospect list selection again and again over the years, and at every stage your strategic goals will guide you in this selection. From time to time, cash ﬂow considerations—or headline-grabbing events—may arbitrarily limit your freedom of action, but if they do so consistently, you’ll need to reexamine your strategy and look for a way to capitalize your direct mail program.

The First Three Years Let’s assume you’ve chosen to take the plunge and proceed with a donor acquisition program, despite the equivocal results of your initial test. I’ll assume further that your organization is new and underfunded and that this is your ﬁrst foray into the mails: you don’t have either a large pool of capital or a signiﬁcant existing donor list to underwrite an aggressive growth strategy. If the response to your second mailing improves, here’s a schedule of the mailings you might conduct in the ﬁrst three years. For the sake of simplicity, I’ll assume you received test results in the fall and your ﬁrst-year program will get under way in January. Table 6.2 depicts your ﬁrst year’s mailing schedule and the increasing size of your donor list as the year unfolds. In the ﬁrst year, you’ve mailed a little over half a million letters. The lion’s share of the effort consisted of progressively larger donor acquisition mailings, conducted about once every three months. Through quarterly donor resolicitation mailings, you’ve netted enough to underwrite your investment in prospecting. (Note that in none of the resolicitation efforts have you remailed all of the donors you’ve acquired; some gave gifts so small that they’re unlikely to be cost-effective to mail again. There are other, proﬁtable uses for such names.) If yours is a typical experience, you’ll end the year at breakeven after all of this activity, despite its unexciting beginning. Table 6.3 shows what the second year’s program might look like. By stepping up your donor acquisition program from 500,000 to 700,000 letters, you’ve added nearly 10,000 donors to your ﬁle. Meanwhile, you’ve increased

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Building Your Donor Base

TABLE 6.2. Growth of a Hypothetical Donor File in Year 1. Year 1 January

Prospecting Volume

Resolicitation Volume

75,000

500

February

1,500

March April

1,350 125,000

3,250

June

3,000 150,000

5,350

September

4,750 150,000

5,350 5,350

November

7,350

December Year 1 Total

3,250 3,250

August

October

1,500 1,500

May

July

List Size

500,000

6,500

7,350

15,600

7,350

TABLE 6.3. Growth of a Hypothetical Donor File in Year 2. Year 2 January

Prospecting Volume

Resolicitation Volume

200,000

February

7,000 6,500

March April

150,000

9,000

10,500 150,000

August

12,000 12,000

10,500

September

14,000 14,000

200,000

12,000

November

14,000 17,000

December Year 2 Total

10,000 12,000

June

October

10,000 10,000

May

July

List Size

700,000

15,000

17,000

63,500

17,000

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Revolution in the Mailbox

the frequency of donor resolicitation efforts from four in the ﬁrst year to six in the second. Chances are, you’ve posted a signiﬁcant net proﬁt from direct mail this year because your donor list has now reached a size at which resolicitation mailings are typically very cost-effective. (In mailings of 10,000 names or more, economies of scale are comparatively signiﬁcant, and a list of that size will permit you to exercise greater selectivity when you decide which donors to mail to.) In the third year, your direct mail fundraising program may unfold as shown in Table 6.4. By sustaining the same 700,000-piece-per-year rate of donor acquisition efforts, you’ve added another 10,000 names to your ﬁle in this third year. However, the size of your donor base has grown only half that much, because you’ve been weeding out dead wood all along the way. You’ve dropped many of those ﬁrst-year contributors who haven’t sent checks since then, and you’ve taken extra pains to improve the accuracy of the ﬁle through address correction procedures. Even so, you haven’t mailed all the available active donor names in any of the eight resolicitation mailings. In six resolicitations, you’ve increased your net profits through careful segmentation based on individual donor histories. In addition, both early and late in the year you’ve added small mailings that target only your most generous and responsive donors. (In Chapter Seven, we’ll discuss the targeting issues that arise in resolicitation programs.)

TABLE 6.4. Growth of a Hypothetical Donor File in Year 3. Year 3 January

Prospecting Volume 200,000

February March April

Resolicitation Volume

150,000

16,000 14,000

18,500

3,500

18,000

15,500

May 16,000 150,000

August

19,500 19,000

17,000

September October

18,000 19,500

June July

List Size

21,000 20,500

16,000

20,500

November

5,000

22,500

December

20,000

22,500

107,000

22,500

Year 3 Total

200,000

700,000

Building Your Donor Base

In this third year, you’ve seen your investment—and your patience—really start paying off in a big way. The continuing cost of acquiring new donors represents only a fraction of the net proceeds of your increasingly frequent and selective donor resolicitation efforts. And the donor base you’ve already built will continue paying off in a big way for many years to come.

Investment Strategies from a Banker’s-Eye View As you’ve already learned, direct mail fundraising runs on two tracks: donor acquisition and donor resolicitation. If you’re starting from scratch, acquiring donors will dominate your attention for the ﬁrst year (or two years, or even three, depending upon how much capital you have and how many risks you can take). As your list grows, however, resoliciting your donors will come to mean more and more to you. The proﬁts from a single donor resolicitation mailing—just one of seven or ten you may conduct in your program’s third year—could easily dwarf the net revenue from even a wildly successful initial test mailing, no matter how substantial it seemed at the time. By the same token, those proﬁts from resolicitation may make your initial losses from prospecting look downright puny. To get a sense of how these factors play themselves out over time, let’s take a look at two hypothetical examples: CITIZENS FOR and PEOPLE AGAINST.

CITIZENS FOR and PEOPLE AGAINST: A Comparison CITIZENS FOR is not well funded. The group started on a shoestring two years ago and only recently managed to beg, borrow, and steal $35,000 for an initial direct mail test. Fortunately, CITIZENS FOR’s 50,000-piece test was a big success. It yielded 800 members whose average contribution was $22.50. The group grossed only $18,000 from this initial effort but was encouraged to proceed because six of the ten lists tested were at breakeven or better and one of two package variations substantially outperformed the other. The successful package variation and six of the ten lists accounted for the lion’s share of the $18,000 in revenue, strongly suggesting that in a second, continuation or rollout mailing that eliminated poorly performing lists, response to the winning package will be much higher overall. Following a contrasting strategy, PEOPLE AGAINST is also on the road to a successful long-term direct mail fundraising program. With an identical 1.6 percent response and $22.50 average gift, the well-funded group shrugged off its $17,000 loss and is ready to pull out the stops to launch a major nationwide campaign. Because of their sharply different ﬁnancial circumstances, CITIZENS FOR and PEOPLE AGAINST follow different strategies, even though the results of their

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initial test mailings were statistically identical. CITIZENS FOR sets out to tap the proﬁt potential of its direct mail fundraising program at the earliest possible opportunity, while well-heeled PEOPLE AGAINST has its sights set on a more distant future. Neither strategy is better than the other; each serves the group’s strategic requirements. In Table 6.5, you can see what these two groups’ contrasting experiences look like, year by year, in the ﬁve-year period following their initial tests. As you can see in the table, PEOPLE AGAINST, with the resources and the grit to push the limits of the market in its donor acquisition program, has built a ﬁle that is ﬁve times as large and netted more than four times as much as CITIZENS FOR. This doesn’t mean that the more aggressive strategy is better than the other. I confess that the entrepreneur in me ﬁnds PEOPLE AGAINST a more interesting organization. Its “high-risk–high-gain” philosophy is the way to make the most of what direct mail has to offer. But such a hard-hitting approach may be inappropriate and even impossible for CITIZENS FOR, no matter what its inclinations might be. However, the capital (and the level of risk) actually involved in even the larger of these two programs was quite small compared to the ultimate returns from the program. CITIZENS FOR and PEOPLE AGAINST advanced $35,000 each for their test mailings. CITIZENS FOR needed no more than another $15,000 to launch its ﬁrst 75,000-piece continuation or rollout mailing, and nothing more thereafter. Its total investment was $40,000; measured against a ﬁve-year net of nearly $650,000, that seems puny. It’s a return on investment of 1,625 percent! I don’t know about your banker, but mine thinks that’s not a bad deal for CITIZENS FOR. By contrast, though, PEOPLE AGAINST made out like a bandit. For its ﬁrst 250,000-piece rollout, the group had to add about $40,000 to the $18,000 contributed in response to the initial test mailing. Its banker was a little worried, but from that point on, the program was self-sustaining. Proﬁts from resolicitations funded the larger and more costly acquisition mailings in Years 3, 4, and 5 and left a lot to spare. A total cash investment of $65,000 yielded more than $2,700,000 in net revenue available to ﬁnance PEOPLE AGAINST’s programs—a return on investment of 4,154 percent. Admittedly, that’s one of the more advantageous ways to view the return on an investment in a direct mail fundraising program. A more conservative method is to examine the amount of capital tied up in the program at any one time, that is, the funds needed to pay the bills for those large, repeated donor acquisition mailings, and compare it with the net returns for that year only. For CITIZENS FOR, this amount never exceeded $40,000—the approximate total cost of one of its 75,000-piece prospecting efforts plus one of its larger donor

97

Building Your Donor Base

TABLE 6.5. Five Years, Two Contrasting Direct Mail Strategies. Year 1 CITIZENS FOR conducts four 75,000piece donor acquisition mailings, for a total of 300,000 prospect letters, building its list from 800 at the outset to 5,300 by year’s end. The proceeds from quarterly donor renewal mailings, combined with modest proﬁts from prospecting, yield a net proﬁt of over $45,000.

PEOPLE AGAINST aggressively pursues a growth strategy, mailing 1 million donor acquisition packages in the ﬁrst year. While the list grows to more than 12,000 by the end of this period, proﬁts from an intensive donor renewal program aren’t enough to erase the loss. PEOPLE AGAINST ends the ﬁrst year another $7,000 in the red. Year 2

CITIZENS FOR continues to pursue its cautious, cash-ﬂow-conscious approach, mailing just 300,000 acquisition appeals (as it will each year throughout the 5-year period). The donor list passes the 9,000mark by year-end; aggregate net proﬁts for the full year top $81,000.

Having built an active donor list of over 12,000 names at a net cost of a little more than $1 per name, PEOPLE AGAINST calculates it’s not being sufﬁciently aggressive. It steps up its prospecting effort to 1.5 million letters in the second year. Despite this increased investment, the program nets $217,000 because donor renewal efforts yield large proﬁts. Year 3

The CITIZENS FOR list passes the 12,500 mark, and the organization tops $139,000 in net direct mail revenue after paying all program costs and fees.

PEOPLE AGAINST’s ﬁle nears 50,000 names by year’s end after another 2 million acquisition letters. Net proﬁts for the year are $492,000. Year 4

CITIZENS FOR’s 300,000-piece prospecting program pushes the donor list to over 15,500. With stepped-up resolicitation efforts, net cash yield from the program is $177,000.

Dropping 2.5 million prospect letters, PEOPLE AGAINST’s ﬁle tops 73,500. Net program revenue is $825,000 for the year.

Year 5 CITIZENS FOR has over 18,000 donors by the end of the year. Net proﬁts for the year are $211,000.

PEOPLE AGAINST drops 3 million acquisition letters, and its ﬁle passes the 100,000 mark. Its net for the year is $1,200,000.

The 5-Year Period CITIZENS FOR has mailed 1,550,000 donor acquisition letters and netted $648,000 from direct mail after paying all costs and fees. Its ﬁle includes 18,000 active donors.

PEOPLE AGAINST has dropped more than 10 million prospect letters and built an active donor list of 100,000 names. Its 5-year net proﬁt was $2,728,000.

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Revolution in the Mailbox

resolicitation mailings that might have been conducted at about the same time. In its ﬁrst year, then, CITIZENS FOR’s return on investment calculated in this manner was 113 percent. In Year 5, it was 528 percent. For PEOPLE AGAINST, the capital required to ﬁnance continuing direct mail operations rose perceptibly as the scale of prospecting grew. In Years 1 and 2, PEOPLE AGAINST needed up to $130,000, and even in the second year net profits of $217,000 represented a return of only 167 percent. By Year 5, the group needed to devote nearly twice as much cash to cover ongoing program costs; current capital investment of about $250,000 yielded net proﬁts of over $1,200,000—a return of 480 percent. Of course, there’s another thing about bankers (as well as the trustees and executives of most charities): they don’t like risk. Without question, CITIZENS FOR’s strategy entailed lower risks than that of PEOPLE AGAINST. While my colleagues and I tell our clients—and ourselves— that the risks are very limited in a carefully managed direct mail fundraising program, they’re nonetheless real. I’ve never yet lost a mailing because a mail truck caught ﬁre, but such things have happened to others (on rare occasions). And from time to time, we’ve seen mailing results dip, sometimes very sharply, because of headline-snatching catastrophes such as a stock market crash or a massive earthquake. It makes no sense to deny these problems and even less sense to let them stop you. The only way I know to address the problem of risk is to manage it, expecting occasional setbacks and maintaining the program’s momentum in spite of them. As the leader of almost any successful new enterprise, whether a business, a nonproﬁt organization, or a political campaign, will tell you, the only reliable way to achieve success is to keep plugging away, day after day, week after week. The rewards don’t often come quickly. But, ultimately, the proﬁts from a well-conceived and well-managed direct mail fundraising program may justify not just a little risk but a whole lot of hard work as well.

Alternative Approaches The approaches followed by CITIZENS FOR and PEOPLE AGAINST represent just two of many possible alternative strategies. Others include: • Seeking huge numbers of donors at gift levels under $10 on the average and resoliciting them as frequently as every week; programs of this type may entail tens of millions of prospect letters annually and donor ﬁles consisting of hundreds of thousands of names. • Investing large sums in costly prospect packages in order to acquire new donors at a high entry level ($50 and up for single gifts and $10 to $25 per month in

Building Your Donor Base

pledge or sustainer programs), and investing more in upgrading them to even more generous levels of support • Establishing an arbitrarily low initial membership fee of $5 or $10 to build the largest possible membership with attractive (and expensive) beneﬁts that cost you a lot more than the entry-level dues, and then identifying and upgrading those members willing and able to provide signiﬁcant gifts • Acquiring “qualiﬁed” (proven) prospective donors at little or no cost through some form of sweepstakes offer, thus allowing more cost-efﬁcient donor acquisition, and building large lists that will generate substantial rental revenue Although the possibilities aren’t genuinely endless, they might as well be. After all, there are more than one hundred million households in the United States, and there’s probably somebody in the industry who thinks that just about every one of them is a good candidate for someone’s direct mail fundraising program.

Evaluating the Tradeoffs I’m sure it’s becoming clear by now: if you’ve turned to direct mail as a way to grow, to diversify your sources of funding, and to broaden your ﬁnancial base, direct mail is likely to be a waiting game for you. In the hypothetical cases of CITIZENS FOR and PEOPLE AGAINST sketched earlier, you can detect some of the tradeoffs you’re likely to confront—often a matter of time versus money. To cast a little more light on these issues, here are two concrete, real-life examples.

The Campaign Two years and seven months have gone by, and ﬁnally The Campaign’s direct mail fundraising program has gone into the black. You’ve mailed 800,000 prospect letters, yielding 12,400 new donors at a net cost of $49,000, or $3.95 per name. Donor resolicitation proﬁts of $130,000 have barely covered this loss plus other costs and fees totaling $81,000. After raising a grand total of $557,000, The Campaign has netted the muniﬁcent sum of $1,500 through its direct mail fundraising program.

What could possibly make this program a good deal for The Campaign? Here are three of the reasons it is: 1. Major donor revenue. From the outset, The Campaign has been systematically approaching the most generous donors acquired in your direct mail program, treating them as prospects for larger gifts. In this aggressive effort, your development department has netted more than $300,000 in just the ﬁrst two years and

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seven months. They’ll derive hundreds of thousands, perhaps eventually millions more, from these same donors in the years ahead. 2. Public relations value. The Campaign’s message has already reached over a million people through direct mail, including a great many national opinion leaders. The Campaign’s public proﬁle has risen perceptibly in these ﬁrst few years, in part due to the added exposure afforded by direct mail. As a public advocacy organization with a continuing need for publicity, this has great value for The Campaign, estimated to be worth $250,000 at the very least. 3. Future direct mail revenue. Starting virtually from scratch, you’ve already built an active donor list of 13,000 names. Although proﬁts from The Campaign’s donor resolicitations were limited in the ﬁrst two years, averaging about $6,000 per mailing, they’ve been running two or three times that much in the third year (in part because of the greater economies of mailing to a larger list). In the next twelve months, that list will net The Campaign more than $200,000 in direct mail revenue alone, after deducting all consulting and program management fees and the continuing costs of acquiring new donors at the rate of $4 to $6 per name. 4. List rental revenue. The Campaign may now choose to increase its current revenue by offering its list of 13,000 donors for rental to approved nonproﬁt mailers. If it pursues this option aggressively, it can net upwards of $25,000 per year for the next year or two. In other words, even this seemingly lackluster program hasn’t just broken even. The Campaign has directly received costly services or cash from collateral fundraising to the tune of more than $550,000 (adding $300,000 in net revenue from major donor fundraising to $250,000 in public relations value but not counting potential list rental revenue). This has doubled the immediate returns from the program. Because of the contribution made by direct mail to The Campaign’s major donor fundraising program, which is properly seen as a long-term development effort, the real net value of the thirty-one-month campaign was probably nearer $1 million. In this case, a $38,000 investment in an initial direct mail fundraising test accomplished exactly what it was supposed to do. Direct mail has planted a tree that will go on bearing fruit for The Campaign for many years to come.

The Institute With another organization, The Institute, your experience has been much closer to a case study custom-made for a textbook on fundraising: • In six years, The Institute’s direct mail fundraising program has netted $3.4 million from gross receipts of $6.5 million.

Building Your Donor Base

• Beginning with just 200 donors, The Institute has acquired a total of more than 50,000 contributors. The average contribution of their resolicitation gifts was an unusually high $64. • A grand total of 4.6 million letters has yielded 114,000 contributions averaging $50— gross revenue of $5.7 million. (Telephone fundraising and other collateral efforts produced another $800,000.) • The Institute posted a net proﬁt from direct mail operations of $119,000 in its very ﬁrst year. In Year 2, net revenue topped $290,000. By Year 5—the high point of the program—the net approached $900,000. • The dramatic growth of The Institute’s direct mail fundraising program paralleled the growth of its operating budget from $300,000 in Year 1 to $2.5 million in Year 5. Many of the new funds raised in large gifts came from donors originally acquired through direct mail.

In this apparently idyllic picture, however, there are hidden and massive problems. They’re best highlighted by the fact that The Institute’s net from direct mail dropped precipitously, from almost $900,000 in the ﬁfth year to barely more than $500,000 in the sixth—and the seventh year promised to be far worse. How could such a thing happen, with a donor list of 50,000 names? It occurred for one simple reason: The Institute decided to stop prospecting. After a massive prospecting binge, The Institute virtually ended its donor acquisition efforts. Because response rates were dropping—and The Institute’s management was preoccupied with internal management issues—the organization cut its prospecting volume from 1.7 million letters in the ﬁfth year to fewer than 300,000 in the sixth. Not only did this short-sighted decision curtail The Institute’s future growth, it also cut off the rich supply of fresh, responsive new donors that made it possible for the group to have netted almost $1 million in a single year. Some people speak of direct mail fundraising as a treadmill: if you’re among the minority of nonproﬁt organizations able to get up to speed, you can climb on the belt, but getting off is a lot more difﬁcult. The Institute’s experience illustrates one aspect of this problem. The principal lesson its program illustrates is this:

You can’t expect to build a list of loyal and responsive donors through direct mail and then simply leave the game, expecting them to sustain your continuing operations at the same level indeﬁnitely.

Direct mail fundraising requires continuous prospecting because of attrition. People die or move without leaving forwarding addresses, their ﬁnancial circumstances change, and so do their interests and loyalties.

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Remember that direct mail is a process, not a passing event. And there’s no point at which the process ends or achieves perfection. It’s a continual search for new marketing concepts that serve your strategic needs because they work a little better than the old ones. The way we identify those new concepts is through testing. This complex topic lies beyond the scope of this book. For an introduction and overview of testing, though, see Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3: Raise More Money with Direct Mail Tests (2003).

••• Meanwhile, it’s time to gain a broader view of the many proven techniques you can employ to get the most from your donors. We’ll take that up in the next section, beginning with Chapter Seven, “Maximizing Donor Value.”

PART TWO

Getting the Most from Your Donors

T

he seven chapters of Part Two explore the nuts-and-bolts techniques that allow fundraisers to secure the greatest possible beneﬁts from their direct mail programs. Chapter Seven, “Maximizing Donor Value,” provides an overview of the donor development process, placing these techniques in a larger context. In Chapter Eight, you’ll learn about “Annual Giving and Membership Programs.” Chapter Nine covers “Monthly Giving.” “High-Dollar Annual Giving Clubs” is the subject of Chapter Ten, and telephone fundraising is spotlighted in Chapter Eleven. “Legacy Giving” is covered in Chapter Twelve. Chapter Thirteen treats the underrated topic of “Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings.”

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7 Maximizing Donor Value

M

ost donors acquired by direct mail will support your organization in an active way for only a short time. A smaller number will remain with you for many years, completing the full cycle of donor life. That cycle has the following four stages: (1) interest, (2) support, (3) commitment, and (4) legacy. 1. Interest. Among those relatively few recipients of your donor acquisition package who spend more than the four seconds it takes to decide to throw it away will be some for whom you’ll have created some level of awareness about your organization and its work. A minority of those people will, in turn, demonstrate their interest by mailing you a ﬁrst-time gift. You can’t count on these people as committed donors; they’re simply declaring that they’ve gotten a good ﬁrst impression of you. Now you’ve got to convince them that you’re really worthy of their support. 2. Support. Through the conversion process that your donor acknowledgment and donor resolicitation program is designed to promote, you’ll convince a majority of your one-time donors that you’re worth more active support. The second, often more generous gift you elicit from a new donor is a more meaningful statement of conviction. She may well be a candidate now for an ever more substantial role in your organization. 3. Commitment. In response to your efforts to upgrade your donors, many will enter onto a level of ﬁnancial commitment meaningful to you as well as to them. But to take this big step toward a major gift may require substantial personal contact as well as months or years of donor education through such means

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as newsletters and in-depth reports on your activities. It’s important, too, that you do everything possible to make the donor’s experience rewarding for her, as well as for you, by publicly recognizing her contribution, if she wishes, and by thanking her not just with an impersonal note but warmly and often. 4. Legacy. A continuing process of cultivation, education, and appreciation will induce some of your major donors to regard their participation in the work of your organization as one of their major contributions in life. These are the people who will serve as volunteers, perhaps even on your board of trustees; they will talk about your work among friends and family, make sizable annual gifts or establish planned giving programs, and remember you in their wills. Ultimately, the bequests and other major gifts you receive from these exceptionally strong supporters may dwarf the contributions from all your other donors combined. They’re a living reminder that fundraising is a long, long process. You’ll derive the full value from your direct mail fundraising program only if you’re able to work with your donors at every one of these four stages. Direct mail can start—even, in some cases, jump-start—the development process. But fundraising is a ﬂesh-and-blood relationship that ultimately requires personal contact to realize its true potential.

What’s a Donor Worth? Sentimental or political considerations aside, it’s entirely possible for an organization with at least a four-year track record in direct mail to calculate with meaningful precision the value it derives from the average new donor, which is termed the longterm value (sometimes lifetime value). It’s rarely easy to do so. But there are at least three methods that may help you get a handle on this fundamental question.

Method 1 By studying your donor renewal rates, you may be able to determine the average “life” of your donors. In direct mail fundraising, that averages out to about 2.6 years, or 31 months. During that time, the typical donor’s two or three renewal gifts will average about 20 to 25 percent higher than her ﬁrst gift. If she joined you with a contribution of $25, you’ll likely receive another $90 (three times $30). If the average gift in your acquisition program is as high as $25, this arithmetic is realistic. If the average is much lower, it may not be true; donors of less than $15 are less likely to renew. After deducting applicable renewal costs and fees, your net from this source should be about $60. Add to that ﬁgure another $10 in net list rental revenue (ﬁve

Maximizing Donor Value

years at $2 per year), and the total value of that donor is $70, or about $27 per year during the donor’s “lifetime” of giving to your organization. If you have a sophisticated development department, with an aggressive major donor program and other opportunities to elicit more frequent and largerthan-average gifts, that number may be twice as high or even higher. Some wellestablished national public interest groups, for example, expect to net an average of more than $70 per year from newly acquired members.

Method 2 By listing all the fundraising efforts you expect to undertake in the coming three years to elicit additional support from newly acquired donors or members and by projecting the returns you might reasonably expect to receive, you can calculate the total expected revenue per donor. (It’s easier if you do so for 1,000 or 10,000 donors and then divide accordingly, as shown in Table 7.1.) Judging from the ﬁrst method, it seems that each new donor is worth a total of $70 to you. Using the second method, it’s $71. Either way, an acquisition cost of $5 to $10 per name seems eminently reasonable, and two or three times that much, or even more, would make perfectly good sense if fast growth is essential to your strategy. Setting that level, however, is a matter of tactics. The strategic problem is to determine how quickly you want your donor base to grow and how much you can afford to invest in growth.

Method 3 This task becomes easier if you bring a truly long-term perspective to bear in your strategic planning. View direct mail fundraising over a ten-year period, and the picture will look genuinely rosy. Just take a look at Table 7.2, which deals with a hypothetical organization different from the one depicted in Table 7.1. In this third method of calculating the long-term value of a donor or member, we take into account not only dues income but proﬁts from special appeals, a lucrative monthly sustainer program, and other fundraising efforts such as merchandising, planning events and travel, or offering other products and services to members. The upshot is that one thousand donors, acquired in Year 1 at an acquisition cost of $5 per donor, yield a total of $203,904 over ten years, or $204 per donor. That’s net revenue averaging more than $20 per year for a decade. Doesn’t $5 seem downright paltry by comparison? However, the donor’s long-term value and the donor acquisition cost are statistical concepts. The truth is, all your donors are not worth the same amount.

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TABLE 7.1. Calculating Long-Term Value, Method 2. Quantity Mailed

Cost per 1,000

Response Rate

Contributions

Average Gift Amount

Gross Revenue

*Net Revenue

Year 1 Acquisition Mailing Special Appeal 1

100,000

300

1.00%

1,000

$25

$25,000

($5,000)

1,000

500

9.00%

90

43

3,870

3,370

Special Appeal 2

1,000

600

6.00%

60

36

2,160

1,560

Special Appeal 3

1,000

700

8.00%

80

38

3,040

2,340

Special Appeal 4

1,000

450

5.00%

50

34

1,700

1,250

Special Appeal 5

1,000

500

8.00%

80

38

3,040

2,540

Renewal 1**

950

500

19.00%

181

25

4,513

4,038

Renewal 2

770

500

16.00%

123

23

2,832

2,447

Renewal 3

646

500

11.00%

71

22

1,564

1,241

Renewal 4

575

500

9.00%

52

22

1,139

851

Renewal 5

524

500

6.00%

31

21

660

398

Renewal 6 (phone)

492

2,000

14.00%

69

35

2,411

1,427

1,000

1,000

3.00%

30

240

7,200

6,200

$59,129

$22,662

Pledge Commitments Totals/Year 1

109,957

Renewal Rate

52.68%

Net Revenue Per New Member

$22.66

Year 2 Special Appeal 1*

750

500

10.40%

78

49

3,857

3,482

Special Appeal 2

750

600

6.90%

52

41

2,142

1,692

Special Appeal 3

750

700

9.20%

69

44

3,015

2,490

Special Appeal 4

750

450

5.80%

44

39

1,701

1,363

Special Appeal 5

750

500

9.20%

69

44

3,015

2,640

Renewal 1*

750

500

21.90%

164

29

4,722

4,347

Renewal 2

586

500

18.40%

108

26

2,851

2,558

Renewal 3

478

500

12.70%

61

25

1,536

1,297

Renewal 4

417

500

10.40%

43

25

1,098

889

Renewal 5

374

500

6.90%

26

24

623

436

Renewal 6 (phone)

348

2,000

16.10%

56

40

2,256

1,559

Additional Pledges

750

1,000

2.00%

15

180

2,700

1,950

$29,516

$24,703

Totals/Year 2 Renewal Rate Net Revenue Per New Member

61.06% $24.71

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Maximizing Donor Value

TABLE 7.1. Calculating Long-Term Value, Method 2, Cont’d. Quantity Mailed

Cost per 1,000

Response Rate

Contributions

Average Gift Amount

Gross Revenue

*Net Revenue

Year 3 Special Appeal 1*

563

500

12.00%

68

57

3,839

3,557

Special Appeal 2

563

600

7.90%

44

48

2,116

1,778

Special Appeal 3

563

700

10.60%

60

50

2,996

2,603

Special Appeal 4

563

450

6.70%

38

45

1,695

1,441

Special Appeal 5

563

500

10.60%

60

50

2,996

2,715

Renewal 1*

563

500

25.20%

142

33

4,687

4,405

Renewal 2

421

500

21.20%

89

30

2,713

2,503

Renewal 3

332

500

14.60%

48

29

1,408

1,243

Renewal 4

283

500

12.00%

34

29

989

847

Renewal 5

249

500

7.90%

20

28

547

422

Renewal 6 (phone)

229

2,000

18.50%

42

46

1,965

1,506

Additional Pledges

563

1,200

1.50%

8

170

1,434

759

$27,385

$23,779

Totals/Year 3 Renewal Rate

66.75%

Net Revenue Per New Member Total/3 Years

$23.78 $116,030

Net Revenue Per New Member Over 3 Years *Assumes a 25 percent shrinkage of list over previous year and a 15 percent increase in response rate and in average gift amount. **Assumes 95 percent of members will receive renewal notices.

Long-term value varies by the year in which a donor joins an organization, the list source, and giving characteristics. Gift level may be the most signiﬁcant of these variables. Of every one thousand new donors you acquire through direct mail prospecting, ﬁfty may give initial gifts of $50 or more, while one hundred each contribute less than $15. Those at the bottom of the scale may, in effect, be worth nothing at all to your organization, because testing repeatedly shows that donors of less than $15 are difﬁcult to upgrade. By contrast, your new $50 donors may be worth a great deal indeed. They’re by far the most likely of your new donors to remit additional gifts and are more likely to increase the level of their support.

$71,144 71.15

$2.00 $36,968

Other fundraising costs per member

Total Fundraising Cost

$1.01

$8.40

Fundraising cost per sustainer

($204)

$4.80

Special appeal cost per member

Cost Per Dollar Raised

$0.00

Net Income

$5.00

Membership renewal cost per member

$0.20

$23,622

$6,028

$2.20

$8.40

$5.28

$1.95

$29,650

$36,764

Acquisition cost per member

Gross Income

44

$660

$171

20

Number of monthly sustainers

1.3

$27.50

600

2

$163

$1,000

Other income from same members

Average annual income per sustainer

1.3

Average number of gifts per member

$25.00

1,000

Number of members retained

Average gift including dues

1

Year

$0.17

$22,494

$4,668

$2.42

$8.40

$5.81

$1.76

$27,162

$180

57

$462

1.3

$30.25

420

3

$0.15

$22,450

$4,013

$2.66

$8.40

$6.39

$1.58

$26,462

$189

63

$360

1.3

$33.28

328

4

TABLE 7.2. Calculating Long-Term Value, Method 3.

$0.14

$22,914

$3,722

$2.93

$8.40

$7.03

$1.42

$26,636

$198

66

$306

1.3

$36.60

278

5

$0.13

$22,564

$3,492

$3.22

$8.40

$7.73

$1.28

$26,056

$208

63

$266

1.3

$40.26

242

6

$0.13

$22,521

$3,381

$3.54

$8.40

$8.50

$1.15

$25,902

$219

60

$240

1.3

$44.29

218

7

$0.13

$22,546

$3,313

$3.90

$8.40

$9.35

$1.04

$25,859

$230

57

$218

1.3

$48.72

198

8

$0.13

$22,529

$3,253

$4.29

$8.40

$10.29

$0.93

$25,782

$241

54

$199

1.3

$53.59

181

9

$0.12

$22,468

$3,200

$4.72

$8.40

$11.32

$0.84

$25,668

$253

51

$181

1.3

$58.95

164

10

$0.26

$203,904

$72,038

$275,941

$3,892

13

Total

Maximizing Donor Value

There is a very high correlation between the level of the donor’s original gift and the likelihood that that donor will still actively support you more than a year later.

A rigorous long-term-value analysis of a fundraising program should break out the value of an organization’s donors in categories determined by the size of their initial gifts. Among other things, an analysis of this sort might point the way toward a new approach to prospecting that emphasizes lists yielding above-average gifts.

Will Your Donors Remember You? If you’re paying good money to recruit new donors, you’d better get your money’s worth. That’s what donor resolicitation efforts are all about. The fundamental principle of all professionally managed donor resolicitation programs is to mail early and often. Many people, especially, it seems, those who serve on nonproﬁt boards, ﬁnd this maddeningly counterintuitive. Chances are you eat, sleep, and breathe your work. It may be difﬁcult for you to accept the fact that for someone who sent you a $25 check two or three months ago, your organization might not be the most important thing in her life this week. She may recall sending you a check, but the odds that she’ll remember what you told her in your acquisition letter are very slim. Something important is lurking in the background here:

Direct mail fundraising is a form of advertising, which is based on repetition.

Unless you get back in touch with that new donor very quickly and repeat the same themes and symbols in your resolicitation, she may no longer be a good prospect for additional support. And the chances are you’ll have to ask her several times before you get a second gift. You needn’t take my word for this. Just try calling at random a few dozen of your new donors acquired by direct mail two or three months after you receive their ﬁrst gifts (and before you mail them anything else). I predict that you’ll emerge the humbler from the experience. It’s conventional in the direct mail fundraising business to deﬁne everyone who’s given you a single gift as a donor. But in a real sense, a ﬁrst-time contributor is really just a qualiﬁed prospect; she may now be aware of your work, but she probably knows little about it, and she’s clearly not a committed supporter. To tap the ﬁnancial potential she represents, you’ll have to educate and motivate her.

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Psychologically, it’s a big step for most people to send a second contribution; that implies a level of commitment many people are never willing to demonstrate. In fact, it’s likely that anywhere from one-third to one-half of your ﬁrst-time contributors will never give you a second gift. But once people have given two gifts, they’re much more likely to contribute yet again, perhaps much more generously. In general, it’s prudent to expect that no more than half your new donors will renew their support within the twelve-month period following their ﬁrst gift. Of those who do so, a much larger proportion is likely to give again within the subsequent year. The progression is likely to look something like this: Of your new donors, 30–40 percent renew in Year 1 Of donors renewed in Year 1, 50–60 percent renew in Year 2 Of donors renewed in Year 2, 60–70 percent renew in Year 3 Of donors renewed in Year 3, 70–75 percent renew in Year 4 Of donors renewed in Year 4, 75–80 percent renew in Year 5 Of donors renewed in Year 5, 80–85 percent renew in Year 6 Of donors renewed in Year 6, 85–90 percent renew in Year 7 Of donors renewed in Year 7, 87–91 percent renew in Year 8 Of donors renewed in Year 8, 88–92 percent renew in Year 9 Of donors renewed in Year 9, 89–93 percent renew in Year 10 The upper limit is imposed by death, illness, changing fortunes, shifting interests, and addresses lost when donors move. In an organization that’s been in operation for many years, it’s common for more than 65 percent of all donors to renew their support in any given year. That may represent a renewal rate of less than 50 percent for ﬁrst-year donors and an average renewal rate for multiyear donors of 75 percent or more. The most urgent task of a donor resolicitation program is to convert the largest possible percentage of your recent ﬁrst-time contributors into donors. Increasing their renewal rate from 40 to 50 percent or from 50 to 60 percent can have profound ﬁnancial implications for your fundraising program in later years. Just as you’ve invested in acquiring new donors, it’s worth spending money to persuade them to become active supporters. This process, sometimes called donor conversion, typically entails a quick thank-you in response to the ﬁrst gift and then a series of donor resolicitation letters about once every two or three months for the next year or year and a half. For many nonproﬁt organizations, an annual renewal system modeled on the magazine subscription renewal process is the backbone of the direct mail fundraising program. Whether applied to organizations that offer formal membership opportunities or to those who simply wish to inculcate the habit of annual giving in their donors, an annual renewal system is often the most effective tool available to

Maximizing Donor Value

maintain a high “renewal rate” (the proportion of an organization’s donors who renew their support in a given year). Once they’ve renewed their support through the annual renewal system, many members or donors are good prospects for special appeals—resolicitation mailings that seek support for particular projects, address especially urgent issues, or commemorate special occasions. One-third or more of your active members will send gifts over and above their dues or annual gift. They’ll feel more involved in your work and may more readily respond to invitations to become more active, perhaps as volunteers. But they’ll expect you to deliver on your promises. If your membership acquisition letter says members receive a quarterly newsletter, you’d better be sure you send one every three months. If you’ve promised a premium for gifts above a certain level, you’re in trouble if you don’t have a system in place to send it out quickly. Membership systems have many advantages, but they demand discipline and efﬁciency; each carries a price tag of its own. In the following chapter, we’ll explore the linked concepts of annual giving and membership programs. Nearly equal in priority to renewing your donors is to upgrade them—convince them to give bigger gifts. Donor upgrading techniques favored by many public interest organizations include gift clubs and monthly sustainer programs. Both are devices to involve donors more intimately in the organization’s work and to provide them with special rewards or recognition.

Monthly Sustainer Programs Monthly sustainer or pledge programs offer new giving opportunities to small donors, whose gifts can add up very fast. At $10 per month, a donor’s annual contribution is $120—far more than she’s likely to give through dues notices and special appeals if her initial gift was a typical $15 or $20. Thoughtfully designed and managed with skill and persistence, a sustainer program can attract as many as 10 percent of your donors and become the ﬁnancial backbone of your direct mail fundraising program. In one organization with which I’m familiar, 4,500 of 45,000 donors contribute monthly gifts; in the aggregate, those monthly sustainers account for nearly one-third of the organization’s $4.5 million operating budget. However, a monthly pledge program requires patience, considerable staff time, and special attention. In Chapter Nine, we’ll explore sustainer programs.

Giving Clubs Giving clubs provide a sense of belonging and special purpose to those donors who contribute large amounts of money. For example, you might offer special status through The President’s Circle for $1,000 per year (paid in one sum or installments), conferring attractive privileges, beneﬁts, and recognition not available to

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your other donors. Or you might choose to confer special status on those donors whose cumulative lifetime giving has exceeded that amount. A fully developed giving club can raise substantial sums from a large donor base, but it requires careful attention by staff. Many giving clubs are assigned full-time staff to deliver the promised beneﬁts, privileges, and recognition and to attend to donors’ correspondence and special requests. We’ll explore giving clubs in some detail in Chapter Ten.

Donor Cultivation Ultimately, however, your success in cultivating donors may have the greatest impact on your organization’s long-term ﬁnancial health. A handful of your direct mail donors may eventually become major donors, whose individual gifts could possibly equal all the support you receive from the rest of your contributors combined. But bequests and other forms of planned giving represent the pinnacle in upgrading donors. Such legacy gifts frequently dwarf individual donors’ lifetime giving. It’s not unusual, for example, for a donor who’s sent a handful of $5 or $10 checks to bequeath to a charity a gift of $35,000 or more. In Chapter Eleven, we’ll probe this high-potential area of fundraising and the ways in which direct mail techniques can be used to promote it. Because your donors will become more and more valuable over time, your donor resolicitation program should seek to retain them as long as possible once you’ve converted them from one-time contributors into committed donors. “Donor retention” is a function of the impact and attractiveness of your programmatic work at least as much as it is of your fundraising efforts, but an effective donor resolicitation program can easily lift donor retention by 10 percent or more each year. Over the long haul, that 10 percent lift will have a profound impact on your budget: a 10 percent annual improvement over typical donor renewal rates will more than triple the number of donors remaining active on your ﬁle after ten years (see Figure 7.1). Grassroots organizations often use “emergency” appeals to boost their fundraising revenue. Threatening to close the doors if there’s poor response to an emergency letter may be an effective short-term fundraising technique, but it’s unlikely to work as well the second time around. More important, it’s short-sighted to cry wolf. Few donors will invest sizable sums in an organization that’s on the brink of bankruptcy. A public interest group’s long-term self-interest lies in enhancing, not undermining, the public’s conﬁdence in its integrity and stability. Your approach to donor resolicitation must relate to your organization’s strategy. For example, if your organization has a strong development department with a well-established fundraising program that includes major donor giving clubs,

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FIGURE 7.1. Donor Attrition over Ten Years in a Hypothetical Direct Mail Fundraising Program.

Percentage

DONOR ATTRITION 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0

0

1

2

3

4

5 6 Years

7

8

9

10

Note: The ﬁgure illustrates how a relatively subtle difference—just 10 percent—in the performance of a donor development program can dramatically affect the rate of donor attrition. The solid line indicates the percentage of new donors remaining at any given point in time with a relatively effective donor retention program. The dotted line shows the percentage left under a relatively ineffective donor retention regime. As you can see, the more effective program results in a donor ﬁle that is approximately four times as large after ten years.

planned giving, bequests, and other special donor opportunities, your direct mail donor resolicitation program should probably emphasize donor education and cultivation. By using such tactics as highly personalized thank-you packages and phone calls, donor newsletters and other free publications, and “high-dollar” direct mail packages designed to elicit much larger gifts, your direct mail donor resolicitation program may prove to be a rich source of prospects for your major donor fundraising efforts. The large contributions that ultimately result will represent a handsome return on a relatively modest investment in donor cultivation. By contrast, if your organization has had neither the time nor the opportunity to build a strong overall development effort, your direct mail program may constitute a large share of your “major donor” fundraising efforts. If this is the case, your direct mail program needs to be as proﬁtable as possible, while providing sufﬁcient opportunities for donor upgrading, so you can get the most from your donors. This may mean mailing very selectively to your donors and treating the most generous of them to particularly strong, personalized packages and friendly phone calls. In effect, this approach mimics the personal attention major donors would get from a professionally run development department.

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How Often Should You Mail? Although you need to plan the frequency of your resolicitation mailings in the context of your organizational strategy, the rule of thumb my colleagues and I follow is to mail more often rather than less. This is true because most gifts from individuals and the overwhelming proportion of gifts solicited by mail come from what I call available income—that modest balance left in donors’ checking accounts after the bills are paid each month. The amount of available income varies with life’s circumstances, but it’s rarely large. To maximize your share of that income when it becomes available, you can’t rely on soliciting your donors just once or twice a year. Your net proﬁts from direct mail are likely to rise as you increase the frequency of appeals to your donors—up to a point. However, that logic can all too easily be carried too far. Many factors enter into the decision about how frequently to resolicit donors by mail, and it is by no means always advisable to mail more rather than less. Here are some of the reasons. First, for some nonproﬁt organizations, it’s simply not practical to solicit donors more than two or three times per year. Sometimes staff is stretched too far with other responsibilities and incapable of running more than a couple of fundraising campaigns during the year. Sometimes, no matter how good the prospects of success from adding another appeal to the schedule, the necessary funds to produce a mailing can’t be found. Second, certain donors should not be solicited more than once or twice per year. These include donors who have speciﬁed that they do not wish to be asked for funds more than once a year, as well as donors who have amply demonstrated over the years that they never give more than one gift per year. And third, in high-dollar and major donor fundraising programs, it’s important to stay in regular touch with all donors (unless they have speciﬁcally asked that you not do so). However, the balance in such programs typically shifts from solicitation to cultivation mailings. High-dollar donors give gifts that are sufﬁciently large that (1) they tend to remember having given them and (2) they’re likely to contribute much smaller sums if asked for money more frequently. With all that said, I believe that the rock-bottom minimum number of solicitations per year is two (except with donors who have insisted on only one). In practice, that would typically mean mounting a holiday campaign at year-end in the nature of a renewal request, plus a special appeal sometime earlier in the year, usually in the spring. I don’t recommend that any nonproﬁt organization with a sizable base of direct mail donors limit itself to such a schedule. Those with fewer donors and more limited resources may have no choice. Such exceptions aside, however, frequency of solicitation is the key to maximizing returns from most of your direct-mail-acquired donors, usually four to eight

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times per year (counting the renewal series as one solicitation). And the key to making that approach work is to stick to the schedule. If your mailing schedule calls for eight appeals this year—roughly six weeks apart from one another—a slippage of ten days to two weeks for each of the ﬁrst three mailings will mean that you’re likely to mail seven times, not eight. Another month’s delay could cut your program down to six appeals. In that case, you won’t be getting full value from your donors. The ﬁnancial impact can be sizable.

Should You Raise More Money or Lower Costs? An intelligent donor resolicitation system can easily be undermined by undue attention to the fundraiser’s nemesis—the fundraising ratio, that is, the cost of a dollar raised (see Resource E for a fuller explanation). Let’s say your board’s fundraising chair tells you it’s unacceptable to continue paying 38 cents to raise every dollar in your direct mail donor resolicitation program. She says you have to drive the ratio below 30 cents (see Table 7.3). That may be easy to accomplish, as you can see in Table 7.3. Simply reduce the frequency of your resolicitations, which will improve the response rate on each mailing. Stop mailing to less recent and less generous donors, which will raise both the average gift and the response rate. And mail cheaper packages, which might lower the average gift and the response rate but is likely to raise proportionally more money for every dollar expended. In the example illustrated here, this combination of choices will succeed in raising the response rate from 6 percent to 8 percent

TABLE 7.3. Cutting Costs Can Be a Losing Proposition. Current Resolicitation Schedule Number of resolicitations Average number of donors resolicited per mailing

Proposed Resolicitation Schedule

8

4

Difference (4)

20,000

15,000

(5,000)

160,000

60,000

(100,000)

9,600

4,800

(4,800)

6%

8%

33%

Year’s gross resolicitation revenue

$336,000

$192,000

($144,000)

Year’s total cost of resolicitations

$128,000

$50,000

($78,000)

Net resolicitation revenue

$208,000

$142,000

($66,000)

$0.38

$0.26

(32%)

Year’s total resolicitation quantity Number of gifts received Average percent response per resolicitation

Cost per dollar raised

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and the average gift from $35 to $40. The cost of the direct mail donor resolicitation program accordingly will drop from $128,000 to just $50,000. The fundraising ratio thus will plunge from 38 cents on the dollar to 26 cents, an improvement that will please your fundraising chair—until you explain the disadvantages. In this case, overemphasis on efﬁciency in your donor resolicitation program would be counterproductive because (1) your net revenue will drop by $66,000, or nearly 32 percent, and (2) your donor list will shrink by several thousand individuals. By mailing 100,000 fewer resolicitation letters, you won’t just be cutting costs, you’ll also be missing opportunities to convert new donors into active supporters and to persuade lapsed donors to come back into the fold. Your organization would continue paying the price of this short-sightedness for many years to come. Remember, your donors are your friends, and they want to hear from you.

Which Donors Are Key? At ﬁrst, nearly all the donors you acquire from direct mail acquisition will be, for all intents and purposes, of equal importance. Initially, you’ll have just a few thousand on ﬁle. Your biggest challenge then will be to ﬁnd cost-effective ways to stay in touch with them and build their understanding of your work. If you’re lucky, you’ll net at least modest amounts, which will help subsidize your prospecting program. Once you’re beyond the four- to six-thousand donor level, you can begin segmenting your ﬁle (as described in Chapter Two). Segmentation is the key to a profitable donor resolicitation program over the long term.

Remember, segmentation is based on one simple truth: some people give more money than others.

As you’ll recall, those who’ve contributed most generously, most frequently, and most recently are your best prospects for additional gifts. They’re the people to whom you should be paying the most attention and in whom you should be investing the most in your donor resolicitation efforts. Depending on the precise criteria applied, these core donors may include anywhere from 15 to 30 percent of your ﬁle, but the chances are they contribute three-quarters or more of the net income from your fundraising program. You may be tempted to refrain from resoliciting anyone who’s just given you a gift or even to methodically eliminate from later appeals those who respond to the

Maximizing Donor Value

ﬁrst or second letter you’ve sent this year. In most cases, this is a very big mistake, for three reasons: 1. The appeals you write are—or should be—one of your donors’ primary sources of information about your work. Not to inform the donors who have shown the most interest in your organization reﬂects misguided priorities. Resolicitation is part of the process of “bonding” and cultivating your donors, some of them potential major contributors. 2. Your donors contribute to you from their current income. Most write checks that are small by their own standards, and many are willing to do so several times a year. By failing to solicit them regularly, you’ll lose a great deal of money. 3. Recent contributors are most likely to give again. They’re the most interested, the most responsive, and the best prospects for special opportunities such as monthly sustainer programs or gift clubs. An intelligent approach to segmentation requires that you establish the most cost-effective frequency of contact with each segment of your donor ﬁle. You might choose to group the individuals on your list into four broad categories: 1. Core donors, including your most generous, most frequent, and most recent contributors 2. Active donors, who aren’t quite so generous, frequent, or recent as core donors 3. Lapsed donors, whose last gift arrived at least a year or eighteen months ago but not longer than two or three years ago 4. Former donors, who haven’t contributed for two or three years or more It’s simply not worth treating all four of these groups in the same way. The only segment that’s really worth your full attention at all times is your group of core donors. You should be in touch with them no less frequently than once every two months (six times per year) and perhaps more often than once per month. Your active donors may not respond well to such frequent contact. Four to six times per year should sufﬁce. You may recapture a signiﬁcant proportion of your lapsed donors with two, three, or four mailings this year. The more recent of your former donors may be worth one or two last direct mail efforts this year but probably not more. The biggest cliché in fundraising is the Pareto Principle, the so-called 80–20 Rule: 20 percent of your donors will contribute 80 percent of your fundraising

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revenue, even though they may require only 20 percent of your fundraising budget. The other 80 percent—soaking up four-ﬁfths of the budget—will yield only 20 percent of your revenue. Identifying and cultivating your core donors and treating other signiﬁcant segments of your donor ﬁle in different but appropriate ways, is an effort to turn the 80–20 Rule on its head. In fact, in most well-managed fundraising programs today, a handful of top donors account for a substantial proportion of the revenue, sometimes 50 percent or more. The top 20 percent, then, may collectively account for more than 90 percent of total revenue. Through segmentation, you can invest greater resources to maximize the returns from your most productive segments and minimize the cost of working with those that are less productive. This will help ensure that you get the highest possible net proﬁt from your direct mail fundraising program. In the long run, however, your direct mail program may pay off even more handsomely with major gifts from a few individuals. As your donor list grows, you should put into place a system of “donor research” to determine whether new donors are good prospects for large gifts. These are the individuals you’ll want to cultivate carefully. You’ll write and call them personally and arrange face-to-face visits, if possible. Their contributions, amounting to many thousands of dollars, may represent the real payoff for all the hard work that’s gone into your direct mail fundraising program. You may wish to conduct donor research in-house, checking the local library’s Who’s Who, the Foundation Directory, Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives, and other likely sources of information about wealthy individuals. Chances are, though, you’ll ﬁnd that donor research is as taxing and distracting as other labor-intensive aspects of your fundraising program. Some large nonproﬁt institutions, especially colleges and universities, support substantial donor research departments. If you have little or no development staff, you may conclude it’s worth paying someone else to do the job of donor research. A variety of professional services are available in this important ﬁeld. The directories of vendors published by fundraising trade periodicals contain the names of ﬁrms that provide such services.

Who’s Counting and Keeping Track of the Money? As your donor base grows, you’ll probably begin paying more and more attention to two of the most nettlesome questions about direct mail fundraising: (1) Who’s going to count the money? and (2) Who will keep track of all the people who give it to you? It’s important to think through your answers to these questions before you mail your initial test. The decisions you make in this area of so-called back-end services are fateful. And they may not be obvious.

Maximizing Donor Value

Here’s the fundamental principle on which an intelligent back-end system for direct mail fundraising is based:

Donors are people, and they deserve to be treated as individuals. They also tend to give more money when they’re treated well.

In practice, this means you’ll need: • A quick-turnaround donor acknowledgment program • An extensive database maintenance system that includes almost every scrap of useful information your fundraising results can provide about each individual donor • A meticulous system of data entry, with built-in quality control procedures to maintain a ﬁle of the highest possible accuracy • A working system for your staff to respond to individual donor questions and complaints in a timely and polite manner A system to deliver all these services may cost you $2 to $3 per donor per year. Admittedly, such a costly back-end system may not work well for a direct mail fundraising program involving hundreds of thousands of $5 or $10 donors. Three dollars per year per donor will probably eat up too much of the proﬁts. But a program in which the average gift is $15 or higher, thus allowing for upgrading, may not live up to its potential without the sort of labor-intensive back-end system necessary to ensure that your list will lend itself to credible, personalized appeals. About every six months, almost like clockwork, one of our long-standing clients asks me, “How big a computer do I need to hold my list? How much will a computer like that cost?” The question may appear disingenuous—obviously, there’s more involved than computer hardware—but it highlights one of the enduring sources of confusion in direct mail fundraising: whether to hire additional staff or train volunteers to provide back-end services in-house instead of retaining a service bureau or subscribing to an on-line donor base management system. The best answer to that question—like most other things about direct mail— has its roots in your organizational strategy. With a multi-million-dollar direct mail fundraising program involving many tens or hundreds of thousands of donors in an intensive program of communications and resolicitation, an in-house service bureau might make sense. It might also be cost-effective at the other end of the scale, with a small, inactive direct mail program if your staff or an exceptionally well- trained, disciplined, long-term volunteer can handle the job in a timely and consistent manner.

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But most of the time, for direct mail fundraising programs of the type and the scale described in this book, keeping the work in-house makes no sense at all. An in-house system for back-end processing will burden your organization with specialized staff and computer hardware and software, and it will subject you to all the headaches entailed by running what is, after all, a business. Very few nonproﬁts or political campaigns can run such a business in a consistently efﬁcient and costeffective manner. Once again, it’s worth taking a leaf from the annals of the business world and asking yourself the single most critical question you can pose about your organization: What business are you in? With an aggressive direct mail fundraising program and a growing donor ﬁle to match, you could easily discover that you’re really in the data-processing business if you try to build an in-house service bureau, no matter what your mission statement might say. Willy-nilly, the tail wags the dog. To avoid this problem, some organizations ﬁnd it worthwhile to pay professionals to do the job, even if they’re convinced they can do it just as well and perhaps even more cheaply. Back-end services require a respect for complex procedures and a compulsive attention to detail. The job looks deceptively easy, but it may require an investment of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in systems analysis, programming, training, and maintenance for you to do it right. The cost of the computer hardware is a minor consideration by comparison. One alternative favored by many organizations is to buy or lease a specialized fundraising software program. There are many on the market, some offered in conjunction with dedicated hardware systems, others sold “in the can,” with or without continuing technical assistance. If it works well (which, in my experience, is all too rare an occurrence), a system of this sort might lower your investment in an in-house service bureau. But it begs the question of where the job should be done. I believe that, unless you’re at a big-budget charity that can afford highpriced data processing staff, your wisest course is to retain a specialized service bureau to manage all your back-end operations and be held accountable for doing the job right. Alternatively, you might consider a Web-based donor management system, which would allow you to outsource the technical aspects of the back-end operation (but not such things as processing gifts and updating your donor ﬁle). Several application service providers (ASPs) offer such services. (But if you choose to go that route, be sure you choose a ﬁrm that is ﬁnancially stable and well enough managed to give you conﬁdence that it will still be in business next year or the following.) There are at least four separate (though not necessarily separable) tasks in a back-end system:

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1. Cashiering: processing and depositing contributions to your bank account 2. Caging: processing and recording the list-by-list and package-by-package information encoded on the response devices in your mailing and outputting it in the form of ﬂashcounts (progress reports on your mailing that break down the results by list or segment) 3. Acknowledging donors: thanking your donors and perhaps asking for another gift at the same time 4. Maintaining lists: updating your donor ﬁle, recording both new information and corrections to the old, and providing periodic analytical reports that depict the cumulative impact of all your fundraising programs, segment by segment In the earliest stages of your direct mail fundraising program, it may be most efﬁcient for your staff to tend to cashiering, caging, and acknowledging donors. If you have an effective list maintenance system in place, it may also be worthwhile to fold in the early test results. But once your direct mail program is under way, I believe it usually makes sense to transfer your list maintenance to professionals. Ideally, you’ll ﬁnd a service bureau that caters to direct mail fundraisers and offers an integrated system of caging, maintaining lists, and acknowledging donors. It may be advisable for you to continue cashiering your direct mail returns inhouse, especially if they’re just one of several active sources of income and you’re already equipped to process large numbers of checks. In such circumstances, however, you’ll need to transfer the raw data from your direct mail program to the service bureau (or the ASP) on a timely basis. As your direct mail fundraising program grows in scope and complexity, the demands on your back-end systems will increase geometrically.

••• Now that we’ve gained some perspective on how to maximize donor value, let’s turn to what I regard as the most fundamental tool in the realm of resolicitation: the annual giving or membership renewal process, which is the subject of Chapter Eight.

8 Annual Giving and Membership Programs

S

crape away all the jargon and fantasy that adhere to the concepts of fundraising and philanthropy, and what’s the core idea you ﬁnd at the center?

It’s this:

Nonproﬁts want repeat gifts from donors. And most donors give repeatedly.

I know of no law or graven tablet that establishes this principle. But it’s clearly the basis of almost all contemporary fundraising programs. And no wonder. As we’ve seen, it’s difﬁcult and often costly to recruit new donors—so much so that new donors’ ﬁrst gifts rarely represent a net ﬁnancial gain for a nonproﬁt organization. This reality underlies what so many of us old hands in fundraising regard as a universal principle: our ﬁrst professional duty is to build relationships with our donors. Because only by building strong relationships with donors can we hope to secure the repeat gifts that make the whole process worthwhile. In direct mail, four methods are commonly employed to give donors opportunities to make repeat gifts: 1. Frequent resolicitation mailings (special appeals), anywhere from a minimum of three or four per year to two or more per month. Sometimes these appeals are labeled renewal mailings, but they are not often related to the calendar.

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2. The annual fund or annual campaign, which employs a series of resolicitations calculated to secure at least one gift per donor per year. These are usually done on a calendar year basis. 3. Membership or donor programs that seek annual membership renewals. These are frequently combined with appeals for additional gifts as well. 4. Monthly giving (often called sustainer or pledge in the United States, elsewhere regular or committed giving) programs. These programs usually secure scheduled monthly gifts from selected donors through credit cards or preauthorized checking using electronic funds transfer (EFT). Monthly giving by check is little known outside the United States, though it’s still a signiﬁcant factor here. Those who choose the ﬁrst option—relying on frequent appeals—usually treat each mailing as a campaign in its own right. They argue that they secure a higher number of gifts per donor per year by not focusing donors’ attention on an annual giving calendar. Too many donors, they say, feel that their obligation to a nonproﬁt organization is complete once they’ve sent one gift per year. The annual fund or annual campaign—the predominant model in fundraising for higher education as well as many other nonproﬁts—is based on the hope that, by committing to annual gifts, donors will see their support as a long-term (even life-long) proposition. Frequently, nonproﬁts that employ this fundraising model want to limit their fundraising appeals to a particular time of year. An annual campaign lends itself well to a schedule that is limited to, say, three or four months of the year. Besides, annual campaign advocates argue, donors who are repeatedly asked for special gifts without reference to a long-term commitment to an organization are likely to lose interest over time and simply stop giving. Like annual funds, membership programs base their appeal on a yearly calendar, but they offer a deeper sort of relationship to their donors. Members’ responsibilities, beneﬁts, and privileges are clearly spelled out (at least in theory). Members are therefore more likely to show loyalty and to renew their support year after year, at least so long as they continue to perceive the beneﬁts of membership to be worth the price. Without the inducement of valuable beneﬁts, membership advocates say, donors are less likely to join in the ﬁrst place or to keep on giving (see Table 8.1). Monthly giving programs are consistent with systems based on repeated special appeals, annual campaigns, and membership and may be employed simultaneously with any. Such programs are widely acknowledged to be one of the most effective (some say the most effective) ways to upgrade donors acquired by mail. In the balance of this chapter, we’ll explore the second and third of these four alternative approaches to securing repeat gifts from donors by mail. The ﬁrst method—frequent special appeals—requires no detailed explanation. The fourth—

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TABLE 8.1. Hypothetical Mailing Schedules for Four Strategies to Give Donors Opportunities to Make Repeat Gifts. Month

(1) Appeals

(2) Annual Fund

(3) Membership

Appeal 1

Appeal 1

Renewal 1*

Appeal 2

Appeal 2

Appeal 3

Appeal 3

(4) Monthly**

January February March April

Renewal 2*

May June

Renewal 3* Renewal 4*

July

Renewal 5* Appeal 1

August September

Appeal 4

October

Appeal 5

Annual 1

Appeal 2

November

Appeal 6

Annual 2

Appeal 3

December

Appeal 7

Annual 3

Appeal 4

Appeal

*Repeated renewals are sent only to nonrespondents. **In most successful monthly giving programs, payment notices are not sent monthly because donors have preauthorized their giving through credit cards or EFT from their bank accounts. A special newsletter exclusively for monthly donors or occasional news bulletins might be, however, and perhaps occasional cultivation mailings as well.

monthly giving—will be the subject of the next chapter. For starters, let’s examine one of the most widely used tools in the annual fund business: the renewal series.

The Annual Renewal Series Human ingenuity has devised a seemingly limitless number of ways to measure time—everything from the nanosecond to the endless stretches represented by the eras of geological time. But we understand only three of those measurements intuitively: the day, the month, and the year. Those are concepts we have learned from the earth, the moon, and the sun, and we can feel them in our bones. We organize our lives around them. Quite naturally, then, those three benchmarks have been widely incorporated into our work as fundraisers, because those concepts are meaningful to donors, too. The rhythm of all our lives is organized into days, months, and years. For most donors, giving an annual contribution makes sense. It’s a natural thing to do. Annual campaigns, annual funds, and membership programs derive much of their power from the human tendency to think of life one year at a time.

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The mechanism that lies at the heart of many such programs is the annual renewal series. Chances are, you’re familiar with the concept of an annual renewal, even if you’ve never sent a charitable contribution through the mail. For many decades, magazines have commonly operated on a similar annual schedule, sending renewal notices by mail at frequent intervals until you renew your subscription (although this practice is changing at many periodicals). Nowadays, those bigcirculation magazines that still employ a renewal series may use as many as ﬁfteen such notices before they (ﬁnally) recognize that you really don’t want to renew your subscription. The annual renewal series for an annual fund or a membership program is built on the same framework of serial reminders or notices. Donors or members receive a series of anywhere from three to ten such efforts (or even occasionally more)— usually mailings but sometimes including telephone calls. A more typical renewal series, consisting of ﬁve efforts, might follow a schedule along the lines shown in Table 8.2. Some nonproﬁt organizations mail their renewals based on each donor’s “anniversary date” (usually, the date on which the ﬁrst annual gift or membership dues payment was received). In practice, this usually means initiating the renewal series each month for those whose memberships lapse in a given month. Many smaller organizations begin their renewal series at a ﬁxed time of the year, starting, say, in February or June. Yet other organizations opt for a quarterly mailing schedule, consigning each donor to a particular quarter of the year. The choice of mailing schedule is a pragmatic matter and ought to be decided on the basis of which approach is the most efﬁcient. To my mind, it’s not a question of which scheduling option is more “successful,” that is, produces more net revenue. I’m very skeptical that a monthly schedule nets more money, except possibly for the very largest organizations, because the extra costs of repeating as many

TABLE 8.2. Schedule for a Hypothetical Five-Effort Renewal Series. Effort #

Possible Theme

Maildate

1

“Early Bird Renewal”

Day 1

2

“It’s time to renew”

Day 45

3

“A gentle reminder”

Day 75

4

“Have you forgotten?”

Day 105

5

“It’s not too late”

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Annual Giving and Membership Programs

as eight different renewals in a single month are considerable. More important factors are these, I believe: • An annual schedule is less prone to error. In practice, segmentation is often ﬂawed because someone forgets to include a detail on a list order, or a data entry person is distracted and leaves out one important piece of information. • An annual schedule generates far fewer complaints (once the system is accepted by the donors or members). With variable renewal dates, membership staff members waste countless hours ﬁelding complaints from members who think their dates are screwed up. • An annual schedule permits more cost-effective segmentation of special appeals. All it requires is one “window” in the appeal schedule, not twelve smaller ones. Though a renewal series on a ﬁxed annual schedule is generally preferred for the reasons given, there may be cases in which a monthly expire date really makes sense: a museum that acquires a lot of walk-up members year-round, for example, where members lose parking beneﬁts (or whatever) when their membership expires. A more important question than the timing of a renewal series concerns how well a series performs in comparison with direct mail programs based exclusively on special appeals. I’ve been told by several organizations that they’ve tested renewal series against repeated special appeals and found that the renewals didn’t work. I have no idea what they meant by a test. Nor would anyone offer data to illustrate. All I know is that renewals have always lifted net revenue when my colleagues and I have introduced them for our clients. There is also considerable variation in the nature of the contents of these renewal mailings from one organization to another. Some favor long letters chock full of substantive information (for at least some efforts in the series). Other organizations limit themselves to brief, businesslike notices that rely on donors’ natural tendency to renew their support in the absence of some good reason not to do so. For typical examples of the briefer (and more common) sort, see Exhibit 8.1.

Donor Beneﬁts I’ll assume that you’re a generous person and that you yourself are a donor to several deserving nonproﬁt organizations. Why are they deserving? Why do you give them money? If you dig deeply into your motivation, you’ll probably uncover a number of reasons: spiritual fulﬁllment, perhaps; a desire to give something back to your community; the hope of learning more about a particular issue; or simply the need to do something afﬁrmative in a society that frustrates you in so many

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EXHIBIT 8.1. Key Elements of a Five-Effort Annual Renewal Series.

Annual Giving and Membership Programs

EXHIBIT 8.1. Key Elements of a Five-Effort Annual Renewal Series, Cont’d.

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EXHIBIT 8.1. Key Elements of a Five-Effort Annual Renewal Series, Cont’d.

Annual Giving and Membership Programs

EXHIBIT 8.1. Key Elements of a Five-Effort Annual Renewal Series, Cont’d. Source: Bread for the World. Examples reproduced with permission.

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ways. There are dozens of possibilities, perhaps hundreds. (I’ve described twentythree motivations for giving in my book, How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters [2001].) But the common denominator among all these motives is that giving delivers beneﬁts to the donor. There may be both intangible and tangible beneﬁts for giving to a particular cause or institution or in response to a speciﬁc appeal. The intangible ones are, I believe, by far the most powerful, because they unlock those deeper motives that most truly explain why you or I respond to appeals. But tangible beneﬁts can be important as well, especially in a membership program (where they are typically more numerous). The tangible beneﬁts of giving may include any of a multitude of attractions such as the following: • A newsletter or magazine about the organization’s work or the issues it addresses • Discounts on admission to exhibits or performances • Opportunities to learn directly from staff members about issues or programs • Invitations to exclusive special events • Get-well cards to sign and send to patients in a children’s hospital • Action alerts or bulletins about fast-breaking developments in the organization’s work, offering opportunities to participate directly by writing supportive letters, making phone calls, or sending e-mail messages • A lapel pin, decal, sticker, certiﬁcate, bumper strip, or other emblem of afﬁliation A well-conceived annual giving or membership program typically includes a mix of tangible and intangible beneﬁts. In theory, the possibilities are limitless, but in practice only certain beneﬁts will seem truly appropriate in any given set of circumstances. For instance, a donor to a university annual fund is unlikely to desire or expect to receive periodic bulletins inviting him to lobby the state legislature for additional funding for the university. Similarly, a small donor to a children’s cancer center probably wouldn’t appreciate the sort of elegant Lucite paperweight encasing the center’s logo that a major environmental donor might enjoy. Choosing donor beneﬁts is a matter of judgment about what is appropriate for the level of giving and for the type of organization. In Exhibit 8.2, you can see the beneﬁts offered by several nonproﬁt organizations.

Membership Programs Check your wallet or purse. How many membership cards do you ﬁnd there? The automobile club? American Express? An airline frequent-ﬂyer club? A college alumni association? A health club? A local museum? Chances are, you’re a member

Annual Giving and Membership Programs

135

Your contribution to A

MEMBERSHIP BENEFITS

EXHIBIT 8.2. Membership Beneﬁts Shown on a Direct Mail Fundraising Package Response Device. Sources: AIDS Project Los Angeles, reproduced with permission; TreePeople, reproduced with permission; Save the Bay, reproduced with permission.

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of several clubs or organizations, even if you don’t carry their membership cards. The concept of membership has become second nature to Americans and is fast spreading worldwide because it’s a useful concept that, at its best, helps us deﬁne our own identities. Consider, for example, the art museum membership card you just uncovered in your purse. As a practical matter, it’s useful for discounts on admission to the museum’s shows and on merchandise for sale in the shop. But the fact that you’re a museum member means more than that, doesn’t it? On the most basic level, it means that you’re the sort of person who goes to art museums—a person with discriminating taste and an appreciation of the sublime accomplishments of the human spirit. Among nonproﬁt organizations, museums and other cultural institutions are most likely to maintain membership programs. But they’re hardly alone. Over the years, thousands of other nonproﬁts have adopted the membership model precisely because it’s so well accepted and understood and because it strengthens bonds with donors by emphasizing the intangible beneﬁts of afﬁliation. At many nonproﬁt organizations, the lines are blurring between membership and donor programs. The best example is the spreading use of the annual renewal series for nonmembership programs. However, two characteristics typically distinguish a membership from a donor program: 1. Explicit recognition that, by joining, a member is entitled to certain beneﬁts and privileges 2. The presumption of a long-term relationship, with the expectation clearly stated that membership must be annually renewed Psychologically, these are powerful distinctions, attracting some prospective donors and repelling others. But I know of no meaningful way to evaluate which approach is more advantageous from a fundraising perspective. For a substantial majority of nonproﬁt organizations and institutions, either a membership or a donor program might be appropriate. In a membership program, however, there is a greater expectation of tangible beneﬁts. The museums and other cultural institutions that pioneered the membership concept in the mid-twentieth century have led most donors to look for advantageous reasons to join a new organization. In a donor program, it might sufﬁce to offer a periodic newsletter and little more in the way of tangible donor beneﬁts. A membership program requires more. Marketers for some leading cultural institutions give the impression that joining entails beneﬁts that together are worth even more than the price of membership. Be careful, then, if you elect to adopt a membership program.

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Annual Giving and Membership Programs

However, the annual renewal model—sending notices until a donor gives— seems to work even without tangible beneﬁts, or at least with a minimum of beneﬁts (a newsletter, for instance). This is often the case with systems built on annual funds or annual campaigns, which I ﬁnd convenient to regard as modiﬁed membership programs.

••• Aspects of membership programs have been built into both monthly giving clubs and high-dollar annual giving societies, which are the subjects of the next two chapters. First, let’s look at monthly giving.

9 Monthly Giving

A

nyone who pays a mortgage or puts monthly utility bills on an automatic payment plan understands monthly giving. In the world of fundraising, monthly giving involves a commitment to give a ﬁxed amount—often $10 or $15— year-round, month after month, instead of merely responding to occasional appeals with $25 or $30 checks. A little fast, back-of-the-envelope arithmetic makes clear that $10 per month for a year is a lot more than two or even three $25 checks over the same period of time. From a donor’s perspective, research shows that monthly giving holds a number of attractions: • By giving modest sums on a monthly basis, donors are able to contribute much more over time to their favorite causes and thus have a bigger impact without feeling ﬁnancially pressed. • Monthly giving, especially when it’s automated, is easy and convenient. With preauthorized monthly giving using credit cards or electronic funds transfer, donors don’t have to worry about writing multiple checks, getting stamps, and mailing gifts. There is virtually no paperwork. • Because administrative costs are lower with monthly giving, a greater percentage of each gift will go directly to the cause. • Donors appreciate how monthly giving helps them with household budgeting. It’s a planned expense that helps them keep a careful check on how much they give to nonproﬁts.

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• Many donors ﬁnd it hard to say no to any solicitation request and thus especially appreciate the monthly giving option. It removes the guilt they feel when they receive a solicitation package and can’t afford to give. • People are bombarded with thousands of advertising messages, posing countless choices and decisions every day. And there are many worthy causes and issues donors would like to support. Preauthorized monthly giving to the donor’s favorite organizations relieves the agony of decision making in two ways. Because monthly donors support fewer nonproﬁts, this lessens those frequent decisions about whether to respond to acquisition mailings. And donors often ﬁnd it agonizing to decide which solicitations to respond to from their favorite nonproﬁts. • Because monthly donors are too precious to exchange or rent to others, it’s important always to exclude them from exchanges with other nonproﬁts. For many donors, this can be a strong incentive. • Most donors receive less mail from other nonproﬁts because their names are not shared and less mail from the nonproﬁt they’re supporting with monthly gifts, because it usually replaces the renewal series (and most special appeals). • As members of a special group, monthly donors become insiders and may feel they play a leadership role in the nonproﬁt’s work. • In a well-managed monthly giving program, there is a named contact person at the nonproﬁt who can address all the questions or concerns a monthly donor may have about the organization’s work or its gift processing. Donors appreciate this direct access to a real person. • Monthly giving means less junk mail for donors to discard. • Monthly giving saves time. There’s less solicitation mail to sort, read, and respond to. • Monthly giving helps save the environment. Less paper and less mail means fewer trees are cut down, fewer chemicals used to produce ink, and less energy consumed in transportation. • Monthly giving allows donors to provide reliable and predictable revenue, allowing a nonproﬁt to budget and plan with conﬁdence and thus accomplish more. Exhibit 9.1 shows the business end (the response device) of a direct mail package inviting donors to join a monthly giving club. Note the payment options and the opportunity to send a one-time gift instead of joining the program. I’m indebted to my colleague, Gwen Chapman, for the list of attractions. Gwen has two decades of experience working with monthly giving in South Africa, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States and has conducted extensive marketing research on the topic.

Monthly Giving

EXHIBIT 9.1. Response Device from a Monthly Giving Program Invitation. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists. Reproduced with permission.

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Similarly, for a nonproﬁt organization with a sizable base of individual donors, a monthly giving program is (or should be) an irresistibly attractive proposition: • Monthly giving has proven to be one of the most dramatic ways to upgrade small donors, typically eliciting cumulative annual giving that’s at least three times as much as single-gift donors. • Monthly donors are worth more. The long-term value of monthly donors in a well-managed program can be an order of magnitude greater than that of single-gift donors. • Monthly giving can be a highly effective means to bond with donors, providing the framework for building an unusually strong, lasting relationship. • Long-time monthly donors are the very best prospects for bequests and other planned gifts. • Monthly giving programs can be managed much more frugally and costeffectively than single-gift programs, offering substantial savings in administrative and mailing costs. • Monthly giving provides steady, reliable cashﬂow, largely unaffected by the constant ups and downs of fundraising. Many of the advantages perceived by donors and nonproﬁts alike depend on having in place a smoothly running and efﬁcient gift-processing system. That, in turn, depends on the method or methods with which monthly gifts are accepted.

Choosing Gift Payment Options Traditionally, monthly giving programs were labor-intensive. Because they depended on donors to mail checks in response to statements each month, any nonproﬁt with more than a few hundred monthly donors required a dedicated staff person to process the checks and manage the constant ﬂow of statements, reminders, missed payments, and confused questions. In the United States, many large monthly giving programs still involve processing large numbers of checks and ﬁelding questions and complaints from monthly donors. However, in Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, and elsewhere, where monthly giving (often called committed giving) has taken deep root, contributions by check are rare or nonexistent. Some payments are made by preauthorizing a monthly charge on a credit card. But most monthly gifts entail “preauthorized checking” or, in the United States, EFT. Only by employing automated systems such as these can nonproﬁts truly realize administrative savings and sharply reduce the need for dedicated personnel to manage a monthly giving program.

Monthly Giving

As a consequence, I routinely advise most clients not even to offer monthly donors the option of paying by check. In some cases, nonproﬁts choose to offer both credit card and EFT options at the outset. Others may choose to offer only monthly giving to donors only via credit card, reserving for later the effort to convert donors to EFT. It’s no secret why credit card payments are more desirable than payments by check, and preauthorized checking even more desirable still: costs are lower and loyalty much higher in either of these automated payment plans. But the costs are lowest and fulﬁllment rates highest of all using EFT. Fulﬁllment rates—the percentage of funds collected—may vary greatly from one organization to the next regardless of payment procedures, because some organizations do a much better job than others cultivating and informing their monthly donors. As a rule of thumb, however, I assume that fulﬁllment with EFT and credit cards will be at least 90 percent per year, whereas fulﬁllment by check is rarely as high as 80 percent (and I’ve seen it drop as low as 50 percent). As you might imagine, the logistical arrangements involved in setting up credit card or EFT programs are challenging. However, there’s not enough room in these pages to cover this important topic. Besides, you can turn instead to Harvey McKinnon’s groundbreaking book on monthly giving, Hidden Gold: How Monthly Giving Will Build Donor Loyalty, Boost Your Organization’s Income, and Increase Financial Stability (1999). Because I edited that book, I know it well and can give it my unqualiﬁed endorsement. To get a sense of the immense value of monthly giving to a charity when gifts are fulﬁlled using EFT or credit cards, take a look at Table 9.1, which illustrates the revenue generated over ten years by a group of just two hundred donors who enroll in a monthly giving program. Note that this table depicts the revenue from only a group of new monthly donors enrolled in a given year. It does not take into account the monthly donors recruited either before or after that year. In Table 9.1, I’ve assumed that the rate of fulﬁllment is 90 percent, that is, nine out of every ten gifts pledged is actually received. As Harvey McKinnon notes, 90 percent is the minimum fulﬁllment rate you should expect in a monthly giving program based on credit cards or EFT (unless monthly donors are recruited door-todoor or on the street, where attrition rates are substantially higher). There’s a lot to be learned from Table 9.1: • The average monthly gift rises slightly each year, reﬂecting the results of at least one and often two upgrade efforts conducted during the year. • As a result of the rise in the average monthly gift, the year-to-year decline in gross income is shallow, falling in a decade only to $20,064 from the ﬁrst-year level of $32,400.

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Number in Program

200

180

162

146

131

118

106

95

86

77

Year

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

24

23

22

21

20

19

18

17

16

$15

Average Gift

929

1,032

1,147

1,275

1,417

1,575

1,750

1,944

2,160

2,400

836

929

1,032

1,147

1,275

1,417

1,575

1,750

1,944

2,160

Maximum Estimated Number Number Gifts Gifts

20,064

21,367

22,704

24,087

25,500

26,923

28,350

29,750

31,104

$32,400

Year Income

253,249

233,185

211,818

189,114

165,027

139,527

112,604

84,254

63,504

$32,400

Cumulative Income

TABLE 9.1. Long-Term Income from 200 New Monthly Donors.

23

22

21

20

19

18

17

16

15

$20

Cost per Member

1,771

1,892

1,995

2,120

2,242

2,358

2,482

2,592

2,700

$4,000

Cost per Year

24,152

22,381

20,489

18,494

16,374

14,132

11,774

9,292

6,700

$4,000

Cumulative Cost

18,293

19,475

20,709

21,967

23,258

24,565

25,868

27,158

28,404

$28,400

Net

238,097

219,804

200,329

179,620

157,653

134,395

109,830

83,962

56,804

$28,400

Cumulative Net

Monthly Giving

• Cumulative income over ten years from just two hundred monthly donors amounts to $253,249, with net income not far behind at $238,097. This amounts to a cost per dollar raised of about 6 cents. • With net income over ten years of $238,097 from just two hundred monthly donors, their long-term value is $1,190, or $119 per year. Keep in mind as you review these ﬁgures that the income doesn’t stop coming in the tenth year of a monthly giving program. It will continue to grow. Harvey McKinnon estimates that it will eventually amount to about double the ten-year rate before all the monthly donors stop giving. To gain perspective on the ﬁgures in Table 9.1, review Table 9.2, which shows the income you might expect over ten years from two hundred unusually loyal and generous donors. Please note that, in preparing Table 9.2, I’ve assumed the average number of gifts per donor per year is 2.5, which is unusually high. I’ve also assumed much higher than usual renewal rates. Further, I’ve assumed that the resolicitation cost per donor per year is no more than the cost of servicing monthly donors—another highly conservative assumption. All told, Table 9.2 portrays a much more favorable picture than might be warranted. Ignoring those caveats, let’s now contrast the picture in Table 9.2 with that in Table 9.1: • Gross revenue from multi-donors over ten years is approximately 20 percent of that from an equal number of monthly donors: $50,623 versus $253,249. And net revenue is only about 16 percent as high. • The long-term value of the loyal and generous multi-donors in Table 9.2 is $196 over ten years, or just a triﬂe under $20 per year. Compare that with the $119 per year you saw in Table 9.1. The cost to raise a dollar from these multi-donors is about 23 cents, or nearly four times that for monthly donors. Numbers like these convince me that monthly giving programs are worthwhile, no matter how much time and trouble they require and almost regardless of the amount of money needed to get them off the ground.

Building a Monthly Sustainer Program In Hidden Gold, Harvey McKinnon writes about “the six essential ingredients of a successful monthly giving program.” Those six elements are the following: 1. Your organization must recognize that donor loyalty is a two-way street. 2. Your organization must have an appealing mission.

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Number in Program

200

120

78

55

41

33

28

25

23

21

Year

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

90%

90%

90%

85%

80%

75%

70%

65%

60%

—-

Renewal Rate

39

38

37

36

35

34

33

32

31

$30

Average Gift

53

58

63

70

83

103

138

195

300

500

Estimated Number Gifts

2,067

2,204

2,331

2,520

2,905

3,502

4,554

6,240

9,300

$15,000

Year Income

50,623

48,556

46,352

44,021

41,501

38,596

35,094

30,540

24,300

$15,000

Cumulative Income

TABLE 9.2. Long-Term Income from 200 New Multi-Donors.

23

22

21

20

19

18

17

16

15

$20

Cost per Donor

483

506

525

560

627

738

935

1,248

1,800

$4,000

Cost per Year

11,422

10,939

10,433

9,908

9,348

8,721

7,983

7,048

5,800

$4,000

Cumulative Cost

1,584

1,698

1,806

1,960

2,278

2,764

3,619

4,992

7,500

$11,000

Net

39,201

37,617

35,919

34,113

32,153

29,875

27,111

23,492

18,500

$11,000

Cumulative Net

Monthly Giving

3. You must communicate your message effectively. 4. You must have an efﬁcient and responsive back-end system. 5. You must be able to thank donors promptly and answer their individual concerns. 6. You need an integrated approach to building a donor program. The ﬁrst ﬁve of these six items are essentially self-evident. But the sixth calls for comment. Monthly giving programs aren’t necessarily direct-mail-driven. For many nonproﬁts, direct mail is the principal channel through which monthly donors are recruited and educated. But U.S. fundraisers’ growing experience with monthly giving is leading us to the conclusion that our counterparts in Canada and Western Europe reached long ago: other communication channels may be more productive than surface mail. In fact, monthly donors may be recruited in any one of a great many ways as well as by mail: • • • • • • •

By telephone By television By newspaper or magazine ads With brochures distributed by staff, board, volunteers, or donors At special events Face-to-face on an individual basis Face-to-face using trained recruiters on city streets or canvassing door-to-door (direct dialogue) • Through ads in your own newsletter or other publications • By e-mail or through your Web site U.S. charities are increasingly ﬁnding that telemarketing tends to be a more effective tool than direct mail in converting active donors to a monthly giving program. In Europe, Australia, and increasingly in other parts of the world, direct dialogue has emerged as the most productive way to recruit monthly donors, and that method recruits them from the general public, not from the much narrower pool of a nonproﬁt’s own donor base. Meanwhile, pioneered in Latin America and Europe by Greenpeace, e-mail and the World Wide Web are showing promise as monthly giving recruitment tools as well. Also, some well-heeled charities (principally, child sponsorship organizations and religious organizations) use television and space ads to recruit new monthly donors from the public at large. It’s unusual for nonproﬁts of other types to ﬁnd television cost-effective in the United States. However, Harvey’s principal point is that you should not look for the single most cost-effective way to recruit monthly donors. Instead, you should use every communications channel at your disposal to promote the program, raising awareness

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of monthly giving as high as possible among your donors. If you want to build an active monthly giving program, place ads in your donor newsletter and in your magazine as well, if you have one; recognize new monthly donors in your newsletter and, if possible, in your annual report; include a monthly giving option in renewals and appeals to your donors. The reinforcement that comes from this repetition of your message will pay off in better response to your monthly giving invitation.

The Monthly Giving Invitation Regardless of the medium of communications you use, you’ll need to answer at least six key questions before writing an invitation to your donors to enlist in a monthly sustainer program. Those six questions follow: 1. Are you ready to process monthly gifts on a continuing basis? Unless your backend operation is fully prepared to deal with the complexities of processing automated EFT and credit card gifts, you’re not ready to invite donors to join your monthly giving program. Launching a monthly sustainer program may require you to contract with a bank or other gift processor—perhaps more than one. Beginning that process once the gifts start coming in is far too late! 2. What is the name of your monthly giving club or society? A distinctive name derived from your organization’s mission or its history is ideal (Environmental Advocates or Angels of Mercy, for example). 3. Who will you invite to join the program? Clearly, the club will be open to all members or donors, but which segment or segments will you target in your recruitment effort? In my experience, the characteristics most commonly shared by donors who convert to a monthly giving program are longevity (at least three years of continuous giving) and above-average frequency (say, at least three gifts per year), but sometimes include newly acquired donors as well. But your segmentation could be far more sophisticated than this, and testing over time may show you that other considerations are equally important. 4. What gift amounts will you suggest? Some programs specify a ﬁxed giving level, say $10 or $20 per month. Others offer a range of options ($8, $12, $16, $20). In yet other cases, the minimum suggested gift amount and any higher amounts are based on the individual donor’s giving history. Take your pick, but be sure to base the dollar amounts on the patterns of giving in your own organization. 5. What beneﬁts will you offer? A special sustainers’ newsletter is a common feature of monthly giving programs. However, many such programs offer other tangible beneﬁts as well, such as lapel pins or other branded merchandise (coffee mugs, T-shirts, tote bags) or donor recognition devices (certiﬁcates, plaques). Regardless of whether you elect to offer tangible beneﬁts, be sure to emphasize the true beneﬁts that are spelled out in the opening pages of this chapter.

Monthly Giving

6. What are the options for payment? Many monthly donors fulﬁll their gifts by credit card only, by preauthorized checking, or by mailing you checks. As I’ve already indicated, I do not recommend offering the check-payment option. But you’ll need to decide whether to offer credit card and EFT payment, or merely one of the two. (I normally favor requesting payment only by credit card in the invitation, because that payment option requires no explanation.) In Exhibit 9.2, you’ll see a letter of invitation to a monthly giving program. As you’ll note, this letter focuses on the relationship between the donor and the nonproﬁt rather than on its mission. Clearly conveying to donors the concept of monthly giving and the payment options available often requires more than enough words to cram into one letter!

Renewing and Upgrading Monthly Donors One of the reasons that fulﬁllment rates in monthly giving are so high is that such programs don’t normally require the donor to exert any effort to renew her commitment. Some organizations ask for only a one-year commitment, and others may introduce a monthly giving program for only a ﬁxed period of time to reach some particular goal (in a capital campaign, for example). But those are the exception. In most cases, monthly donors are recruited, in the language of the commercial marketplace, “until forbid,” that is, until they withdraw from the program by notifying the charity or the bank to discontinue payment. Nonetheless, it’s a common practice and a very good one to send each monthly donor an annual statement detailing her support throughout the previous year. (For tax purposes, at least in North America, the beginning of each calendar year is the best time to do this.) Sending this statement affords an opportunity to ask the donor to increase her support by adding a modest amount to each monthly payment— $2 or $3, perhaps, if her gift is in the range of $10 to 15, or $4 to $5 if it’s closer to $25. It’s advisable to suggest an upgrade at least once per year. It’s also a good idea to keep in mind that monthly donors are among your most loyal and generous donors and that they may be willing to contribute over and above their monthly gifts. Some nonproﬁts promise donors who enroll in a sustainer program that they’ll be removed from the regular solicitation stream and not asked for additional gifts. In my estimation, this is a big mistake. I recommend including monthly donors in one special appeal each year—typically, the year-end mailing. Sometimes, monthly donors prove to be the most responsive segment of all! It’s all too tempting to conclude that the most cost-efﬁcient way to treat monthly donors is to ignore them. After all, if you receive their gifts automatically via credit card or EFT, eliminating the need for monthly invoices, why should you spend money writing to them? Don’t fall prey to this specious reasoning! Monthly donors

149

150

EXHIBIT 9.2. Letter from a Monthly Giving Program Invitation. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists. Reproduced with permission.

Revolution in the Mailbox

151

Monthly Giving

are among your most important donors. They’re likely prospects for legacy gifts as well as for steady annual support. In addition to sending them your regular donor newsletter and perhaps a special newsletter exclusively for monthly givers, it’s also important to ﬁnd other ways to keep them informed and involved. Special cultivation mailings at least once or twice a year are a very good idea. One such mailing might be a simple thank-you, recognizing their loyalty and the special role that they play in securing your ﬁnances. Another might be a clipping of a favorable newspaper or magazine story about your work, along with a note from your executive director. (If you include reply envelopes in these cultivation mailings, they’ll produce additional gifts.)

••• Now that we’ve addressed the topic of one specialized form of giving clubs, let’s turn to another specialized form—high-dollar annual giving societies, which are the subject of the following chapter.

10 High-Dollar Annual Giving Clubs

L

et’s be honest now. When you sort through your mail, what happens? Do you immediately reach for the direct mail appeals you’ve received from Save the Bandersnatch and the Institute of Cosmetology? I don’t think so. At least not unless you happen to be (1) employed by one of those two institutions, (2) deeply concerned about the plight of the bandersnatch or the challenges of cosmetology, or (3) an obsessive-compulsive student or collector of direct mail fundraising appeals. Chances are, you sort through the day’s mail in close proximity to a wastebasket, immediately tossing out credit card offers, unwanted merchandise catalogs, and appeals from organizations you’ve never heard of. After all, there’s no real difference between unsolicited mail from a business you’d never do business with and a nonproﬁt you’d never support. But wait. What happens if, say, you receive a letter from Save the Bandersnatch that doesn’t look like junk mail at all? It comes in a high-quality, closedface, 9×12-inch outer envelope, with ﬁrst-class stamps and your name neatly typed, the spelling and address correct, and no teaser or other wording on the front of the envelope save the legend “First Class Mail”—a piece of correspondence, in other words—a piece of mail that contains, well, something interesting. Will you toss this letter away unopened along with all the bulk-rate junk mail? Or will you open it out of curiosity? You’ll open it, I believe. And that belief is based on two decades of experience mailing appeals in similar formats that have generated extraordinary results.

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Packages like this are costly, typically many, many times as much as typical bulkrate appeals. Under the right circumstances, however, these expensive packages pay their way over and over again. This is what I call high-dollar direct mail. But there’s a lot more to high-dollar mail than the cost and care expended on the outer envelope. Similar attention to detail is usually evident on the inside as well: at a minimum, a fully personalized letter and response device, along with a response envelope bearing a live ﬁrst-class stamp. Still, the most important difference between an appeal like this and run-of-the-mill direct mail fundraising appeals lies in its message, not its format or high production values. Packages like this can be used to meet a number of fundraising needs. But I’ve consistently found over the years that they yield the greatest rewards when used to promote annual giving clubs (or gift societies) requiring contributions of at least $500 (and often $1,000 or more) per year. For an example, please see Exhibit 10.1.

The Basic Ingredients of a Successful Annual Giving Society Before you rush off to launch a high-dollar giving club, make sure your organization has what it takes to make a go of it. The prerequisites include the following: • A track record that clearly demonstrates your ability to put gifts of $500, $1,000, or more to good use • Development staff that has sufﬁcient time, motivation, and skill to take good care of high-dollar donors (who typically require far more attention than do donors of much smaller sums) • A large enough number of donors who have given you individual gifts of at least $100 so that you can cost-effectively mail what is likely to be an extremely expensive appeal. (In most cases, it’s a mistake to use cumulative giving as a criterion to select the donors who will receive these high-dollar appeals.) Given these circumstances, a high-dollar annual giving club may make perfect sense for you. The ﬁrst step, then, is to design a giving club that’s perfectly suited for your organization. This will require the following elements, at a minimum: • An evocative name that calls to mind the essence of your organization’s work or mission (such as Guardians of the Wild), identiﬁes some attractive aspect of your work (The Science Council), or honors your founder or some other person who has made a seminal contribution to your organization (The Rachel Carson Society)

High-Dollar Annual Giving Clubs

EXHIBIT 10.1. Sample High-Dollar Invitation Package.

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EXHIBIT 10.1. Sample High-Dollar Invitation Package, Cont’d.

High-Dollar Annual Giving Clubs

EXHIBIT 10.1. Sample High-Dollar Invitation Package, Cont’d.

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EXHIBIT 10.1. Sample High-Dollar Invitation Package, Cont’d. Source: American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Reproduced with permission.

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High-Dollar Annual Giving Clubs

• An appropriate giving level or levels, whether $250, $500, $1,000, or more per year—or some combination of these amounts • A clear understanding about the beneﬁts to donors for enrolling in the annual giving club • Appropriate materials ready for donor acknowledgments (and the delivery of promised beneﬁts) • A clear plan and timetable for the renewal and upgrading of the donors who enroll in the club For a list of the beneﬁts given in many high-dollar annual giving clubs, see Table 10.1. Why go to all this trouble? Because three powerful arguments will become clear as your high-dollar giving club makes its presence felt in your organization: 1. An annual giving club at the $500 level or higher can be a very lucrative proposition in its own right, yielding substantial net revenue. 2. Many of the donors who will give you $500 or $1,000 by mail are very likely to be capable of contributing at least ten times as much when asked faceto-face. In fact, the greatest value of high-dollar donors may be that, by giving such generous gifts, they identify themselves as prospects for major gifts. 3. Whether or not these donors become major donors, they are more likely than donors at lower levels of giving to renew their support and to continue giving for a long period of time.

TABLE 10.1. Typical Beneﬁts for a High-Dollar Annual Giving Club. Membership Level

Beneﬁt

$1,000

Listing in annual report

$1,000

Exclusive quarterly “insider” report from CEO

$1,000

Personalized engraved logo paperweight

$1,000

Invitation to reception with CEO

$1,000

Semiannual telephone conference calls with CEO

$2,500

All above, plus autographed book from founder

$5,000

All above, plus personal tour of project

$10,000

All above, plus luncheon with CEO and board

$25,000

All above, plus annual dinner with founder

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How to Renew and Upgrade High-Dollar Donors The process of renewing high-dollar donors is much like that of renewing other donors, and the same is true of the process of persuading them to give larger gifts. What’s different is the great care used to cater to them as individuals. For example, a direct mail renewal series is a standard feature of most highdollar giving societies. But just like the highly personalized, high-quality packages that brought members into the society, these renewal packages bear little outward resemblance to the standard bulk-mail renewal efforts addressed to most donors at lower levels. Similarly, the telephone can also be used to renew high-dollar donors who’ve failed to respond to two or more written notices. It’s important, though, that the callers assigned to this project be unusually well informed and skillful and that they be prepared to devote more time to each phone conversation than they do when calling lower-dollar donors. And the message itself in these renewal efforts must be carefully tailored to the demands of high-dollar fundraising. It’s important to reinforce the “value proposition” advanced for the giving society, to recognizing the leadership role that highdollar donors play (by serving as an example to other donors), and to treat them as very special people. With low-dollar donors, it’s common practice to seek an upgrade—frequently, a modest one—with every solicitation (“You gave $50 last year. Will you consider $60 or $75 this year?”). In high-dollar giving clubs, the upgrade request is rarely so modest. Normally, a giving society member is urged to move up to the next level of membership. A typical hierarchy of choices in a high-dollar club resembles those in Table 10.2. Viewed in broader perspective, a high-dollar giving club plays a strategic role in an intelligently structured development program: it serves as a recruiting mechanism for major gift prospects. In only the smallest nonproﬁts can the development

TABLE 10.2. Giving Levels in a Typical High-Dollar Annual Giving Club. Silver Membership

$1,000

Gold Membership

$2,500

Platinum Membership

$5,000

Diamond Membership

$10,000

The Directors’ Circle

$25,000

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staff reasonably hope to lavish personal attention on donors of small gifts. Typically, there’s a threshold below which it isn’t cost-effective to invest staff time in paying personal visits to donors. In many community-based, grassroots organizations, that threshold may be $100. At a major university or a big-budget national organization, the minimum qualifying gift may be set at $25,000. Annual giving clubs established at those levels highlight those donors who demonstrate both ability and interest in upgrading their giving.

••• In many organizations, high-dollar giving societies are also used as a means to identify planned giving prospects. However, I believe this is a mistake, as I’ll explain in the following chapter, which explores legacy giving and the important role that direct mail techniques can play in promoting this truly monumental form of giving.

11 The Many Uses of the Telephone

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ow, let me guess: you don’t like the idea of telephone fundraising. Chances are, you’ve got ﬁve or six objections to using what most people in the industry so clumsily refer to as telemarketing. Calling your donors on the phone seems intrusive. It’s a technique widely known to be used by fraudulent charities. It puts your organization’s reputation at risk because you may not be able to exert direct control over the individuals who make the phone calls. And besides, you just hate it when somebody calls you at dinnertime to ask for money—and so does everyone you know! Then why do so many organizations use the telephone so extensively in their fundraising programs? The answer I give to that question is precisely the same as my response to those who ask why so many nonproﬁt groups use direct mail: It works! Now, please don’t confuse telephone fundraisers with bucket-shops peddling tickets by phone to charitable events or the people who call you out of the blue at dinner to raise money for the police or the sheriff’s department. These high-pressure operations—most of them local and some of them ﬂy-by-night ventures that skip from one city to the next—are responsible for the lion’s share of the public’s complaints about telephone fundraising and for most of the fraud. Doubtless, some are honest, hardworking, and sincere, but many such operators exploit their employees, their clients (if in fact they’re legitimate), and the public. To me, telephone fundraising means using the telephone as a communications tool linking a public interest organization with its supporters, almost always its current and previous donors.

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It’s impossible to estimate with any accuracy how much money legitimate nonproﬁt groups and political campaigns raise by telephone in a year, but I’m certain that the ﬁgure runs to many billions of dollars. (The Direct Marketing Association estimates that the total in 2002 was more than $61 billion.) So explosive has been the growth of telephone fundraising in recent years that what was a mere handful of ﬁrms offering these services at the beginning of the 1980s has become a large industry involving many hundreds of companies. And countless charities and public interest groups—most notably colleges and universities—have established inhouse phone banks operated either by volunteers or by professional staff, including students. Whenever you contact thousands of people, whether by telephone or by mail, some of them are bound to become irritated. There’s no more effective or efﬁcient method of communicating with members and supporters than by telephone and no more efﬁcient way to annoy at least a few of them. Without telephone fundraising, however, many groups would raise substantially less money to support their programs. Most nonproﬁt organizations conclude, with varying degrees of regret, that they simply can’t avoid using the telephone. Measured in a revenue-to-cost basis or in terms of sheer net proﬁts, there’s often no way to beat it. Yes, there are complaints. And yes, individual donors matter. My colleagues at the Share Group have found that it’s cost-effective to exert the utmost effort to mollify those few individuals—fewer than 1 percent—who become angry when they’re called. But it’s a mistake to dwell on donors’ complaints. Many people, especially those who don’t reside on either coast, actually enjoy the telephone calls we make on behalf of our clients. Typically, the number of those who thank you for calling far exceeds the number who complain. Many people appreciate getting long-distance calls from groups they support. Each call is an opportunity to pass along a great deal of useful information to your members or donors, often correcting mistaken impressions or reminding them of past successes. Whether conducted by a specialized telephone fundraising company, a commercial telemarketing service bureau, or an in-house phone bank, telephone fundraising has ten principal applications in public interest fundraising: 1. Conducting emergency campaigns. This is the most obvious use of the telephone in a fundraising program, because it’s usually faster to get on the phones than to send a mailing. The phone is also an ideal communications channel in an emergency, because phone callers can test alternative messages easily and quickly and can adapt their conversations with donors to fast-changing events.

The Many Uses of the Telephone

2. Converting petition-signers, event-goers, and on-line activists into direct response donors. Like it or not, direct mail is rarely effective in persuading attendees at special events or activists such as petition-signers to contribute money. Using the telephone can be much more productive. 3. Maximizing return from an annual renewal series. After you’ve reached the end of your rope through direct mail, and one more renewal notice simply isn’t costeffective, your best shot at recapturing lapsed members or donors is by phone. Normally, this is a breakeven proposition, but only in a short-term perspective. After all, now you know how much your donors are worth! Some groups ﬁnd they’re worth enough, and telephone reactivation is effective enough, that it pays for them to call early in the renewal cycle, as the second or third effort in a series. (Keep in mind, though, that donors who are “recaptured” by telephone tend to be more responsive to future telephone appeals than to mail.) It’s not unusual for a telephone renewal effort to persuade one of every four or ﬁve donors to renew their support. 4. Reactivating lapsed members or donors. Although direct mail can be cost-effective in reactivating near-lapsed donors or members, say, those whose last gift was received no more than three years earlier, the telephone may be an even more efﬁcient means to recapture their support, and it’s often effective with donors whose last gift was received much earlier, sometimes even many years previously. 5. Recruiting donors into high-dollar annual giving clubs. Just as my colleagues and I use specialized direct mail for high-dollar donors, we also sometimes use high-dollar telefundraising. This requires employing especially talented, articulate, and knowledgeable callers and permitting them to spend longer on the phone. The higher level of the gifts they produce—often $1,000 or more—makes the effort worthwhile. 6. Recruiting monthly donors. In the United States, direct mail has proven to be an unreliable method to recruit monthly donors. Sometimes it works well. Usually it doesn’t. Telemarketing has proven much more effective. On the phone, between 5 and 12 percent of donors contacted are likely to enlist as monthly givers in a wellmanaged telefundraising campaign. 7. Upgrading donors, especially monthly donors. I’ve successfully used direct mail in specialized donor-upgrade campaigns, but I’ve found over the years that telemarketing yields a higher proportion of upgrades and often a higher average gift as well. 8. Issuing special appeals. To vary the rhythm and the medium of your contact with your donors, you’ll probably ﬁnd it very proﬁtable to conduct one or two special appeals each year by telephone. (Contact more frequently than every six months may be ineffective or even counterproductive.) But if your donors pledge to

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contribute, it’s important to follow through with several reminders to hold them to their word and not let them easily off the hook with direct mail appeals, which may request a lot less money than they’ve promised on the phone. 9. Acknowledging donors. It may well be worth your while to call at least the more generous of your donors to thank them for their support, without asking for additional gifts. A thoughtful gesture of this sort may increase donor loyalty over the long term. For many groups, gifts of $100 or more are big enough to justify this type of red-carpet treatment. 10. Combining mail and phone appeals. Especially for your most generous donors, the considerable expense of combining one or more direct mail contacts with at least one telephone call—all for a single appeal—may pay off in a very big way if it’s wisely planned and well executed. In nearly every type of professionally executed telephone fundraising campaign, donors are asked to commit themselves to contribute a speciﬁc amount of money. That amount is then cited on a follow-up mailing, sometimes called a pledge card or pledge reminder, mailed as quickly as possible after the phone call, ideally within twenty-four hours. Some ﬁrms mail slightly different versions of their pledge cards to donors who indicate support but won’t commit themselves to speciﬁc amounts. Although your speciﬁc objectives will surely vary from one type of telephone fundraising program to another, all six types have several advantages in common: • Net revenue. This may be deferred revenue in the case of reactivation or prospecting efforts (since the payoff probably won’t come until you receive subsequent gifts), but it’s almost always the principal reason to employ telephone fundraising techniques. • Donor education. By conveying a brief and clearly focused message in a comprehensive telephone “script,” your donors are much more likely to remember you than if you mail an appeal to them, because the telephone is a warmer, more intimate form of communication. By script, I don’t mean a message that callers are expected to deliver verbatim. Rather, in professional telefundraising, callers use the script as a discussion guide, and their success depends on their ability to engage donors in two-way conversations that focus on donor interests. In fact, cuttingedge telemarketers are now individually customizing scripts with such personal information, for example, as a donor’s favorite animal species or what type of public television programming a donor watches. • Two-way communications. Unlike all but the rarest direct mail appeal, a telephone program gives your donors a chance to talk back and to feel more involved in your work.

The Many Uses of the Telephone

• Donor loyalty. This may ultimately be the greatest advantage of telephone fundraising. Studies show that donors who are contacted by phone tend to remain donors longer and give more generously and more frequently than those who are contacted by mail alone. Some organizations run telephone fundraising programs independently of their other development work. This is usually unwise, unless your organization can identify a large enough number of telephone-responsive donors who can be called three or even four times per year, with limited direct mail contact. Telephone fundraising efforts are typically—and appropriately—conducted in conjunction with the overall direct mail program. The telephone is best seen as one more implement in the fundraiser’s toolbox. Currently, in state legislatures around the United States, in the Congress, and in the federal administration, legislative and regulatory pressures on telemarketers are growing rapidly. To date, the brunt of the effect has been felt by commercial telemarketers. Telefundraisers have escaped many of the more aggressive efforts to limit their freedom of operation. It’s anyone’s guess what the future might hold. But my advice is to make the fullest possible use of this invaluable fundraising tool, while keeping one eye on the legal and regulatory environment. Think strategically. Integrate your direct mail and telephone fundraising efforts, even if you ﬁnd, as some groups do, that their telemarketing efforts contribute as much as half of the net proﬁts from the combined direct response fundraising program. The mails and the telephone are different ways to communicate a common vision and sense of purpose to your donors. For most members of a large national organization, the only personal contact available is by telephone. Intelligently managed telephone fundraising can add a warm, personal dimension to the relationship between you and your members, reinforcing your donor communications and fundraising programs (including direct mail) and building individual interest and loyalty. Nothing else but face-to-face contact can match telephone fundraising as a way to intensify your organization’s relationship with its members. The telephone is one of very few tools widely available to public interest groups that make person-to-person fundraising possible. However, telephone fundraising is fundamentally a ﬁnancial proposition. The strongest case for it is that it makes money, and it usually does so in a way that’s readily predictable. The numbers tell the most important part of the story.

The Numbers That Matter Most Like direct mail, telemarketing is a numbers-based enterprise that rests on a handful of unique fundamental concepts. The following are ﬁrst among them:

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• Number of names with telephone numbers. It’s unusual for any nonproﬁt to have on ﬁle the telephone numbers for all its donors. Normally, the telephone fundraising agency must submit the donor ﬁle to a service bureau that computermatches it with a compilation of all the listed numbers in the United States. It’s unusual these days for that process to result in ﬁnding telephone numbers for more than 60 percent of the donors on a typical ﬁle. • Contact rate. This rate is the percentage of calls attempted that result in a conversation on the phone. Contact rates tend to vary between 50 and 70 percent. • Pledge rate. This rate is the percentage of contacts made that result in an afﬁrmative declaration by the donor that he would contribute to the cause. Pledge rates typically fall into the range of 20 to 40 percent. • Fulﬁllment rate. This rate is the percentage of pledges that actually result in the receipt of a gift. Depending on the type of telephone fundraising project, the fulﬁllment rate might be anywhere from 50 to 100 percent (or occasionally more, when donors who decline to pledge on the phone actually send gifts anyway!). With that terminology nestled snugly in your vocabulary, you’re ready to review the dynamics of a hypothetical telephone fundraising campaign.

What to Expect from a Telephone Appeal Assume that your organization has 30,000 current donors on ﬁle—contributors who, in this case, have sent you at least one gift within the past twelve months. You’ve contracted with a professional telephone fundraising ﬁrm to conduct a special appeal designed to maximize net revenue and upgrade as many of your donors as possible. Here’s what the numbers might look like: Of your 30,000 donors, the telephone fundraising ﬁrm you’ve hired feels that only 20,000 qualify as good prospects for telephone contact. The rest haven’t given large enough gifts at any one time. A service bureau retained by the telephone fundraising ﬁrm will run a computer-match against your remaining 20,000 donors to ﬁnd their telephone numbers. With a little luck, they’ll ﬁnd 50 percent, or 10,000—a decrease from previous years because of increased use of unpublished phone numbers, especially on both coasts. Working on the basis of a script that you and the ﬁrm should devise together, paid callers will use low-cost, long-distance lines to contact those 10,000 donors, generally between the hours of 10:00 A.M. and 9:00 P.M.. Most telephone fundraising agencies today use a computer-regulated system called predictive dialing, which allows human callers to avoid reaching busy signals, answering machines, or getting no answer. Let’s be generous and assume that eventually,

The Many Uses of the Telephone

after several tries with numbers that don’t answer, the callers reach about 60 to 65 percent, or 6,500. It’s reasonable to expect that between 30 and 50 percent of these 6,500 current donors will pledge a contribution of a speciﬁc amount. (The qualiﬁer is important, because many will also make vague promises or drop hints but not agree to speciﬁc pledges. Nonspeciﬁc pledges are much less likely to be fulﬁlled.) In an active donor resolicitation program, a 35 to 45 percent pledge rate is typical. That means you’ll have, say, 2,600 pledges. The fulﬁllment rate—the percentage of donors who actually send in checks— may range from less than 50 percent to more than 100 percent (in which case, the number of nonpayers is equal to or exceeded by the number of nonspeciﬁc pledges that are fulﬁlled). For a well-run telephone fundraising program, a 70 percent fulﬁllment rate is acceptable. For you, this means 1,820 gifts. If the average contribution to all your direct mail resolicitations is $30, removing the 10,000 least responsive donors should raise that average by at least 10 percent, and the warmth and innate persuasiveness of telephone contact should add another 10 percent to the average gift. This means an average of about $36 for each of the 1,820 gifts you receive from this telephone fundraising project, or a gross of $65,520. (Naturally enough, the average gift almost always depends on whom you call.) But don’t expect all $65,520 to come in at once. Telephone contact may take time—between three and six weeks, generally, to contact all 6,500 donors. Your telephone fundraising ﬁrm then has to mail out pledge cards (within twenty-four hours of the call, if they’re good), and you have to wait for the donors to respond. (See Exhibit 11.1 for a typical example.) Many don’t. Most programs follow up once or twice by mail and sometimes by phone as well. Generally, 70 to 80 percent of the proceeds from a telephone fundraising program will be received within 120 days of the date of the ﬁrst contact with donors. The last contributions should be received within 120 days of the date of the last contact. As you can see, telephone fundraising is rarely a quick way to raise a buck. Although the length and character of the script will determine how much time each phone contact requires, it’s likely that callers will average anywhere from nine to thirteen contacts per hour. The median is almost squarely in the middle of that range, or about ten or eleven contacts per hour. (At that rate, it will take about 620 hours of calling to complete the job.) If the ﬁrm is charging you $4 per contact (including direct mail follow-up costs), the cost of the effort will be $26,000. At $5 per contact, the total cost would be $32,500. Eventually, you’ll net somewhere between $33,000 and $40,000. The ratio of revenue to costs in this hypothetical project is between 2.0 and 2.5 to 1. In other words, you’ll double your money. In addition, the chances are you’ll

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EXHIBIT 11.1. Telephone Pledge Package. Source: Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Reproduced with permission.

be getting gifts from many more than the number of donors who would respond to a direct mail appeal, you’ll get larger gifts from many of them than they’ve ever given before by mail, and you’ll have established personal contact with more than one-third of your best donors, which will educate them and build their loyalty. Like other direct response ﬁelds, telephone fundraising has become increasingly complex. Many telefundraising ﬁrms now maintain contact records of who pledged and who didn’t. In subsequent calling programs, they eliminate donors who have repeatedly refused to give in the past, thus lowering program costs and increasing pledge rates. An especially effective telephone fundraising program—one carefully segmented to deliver the most powerful message to each segment or type of donor—can

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upgrade the average contribution by more than 10 percent. Some programs successfully generate major gifts: single contributions of $10,000 or more are not unknown. Careful direct mail follow-up can substantially raise fulﬁllment rates. But don’t be mesmerized by dollars and cents. Telephone fundraising can play a strategic role for your organization by converting many of your one-time contributors into genuine supporters, by generating real enthusiasm among many of your reliable donors and coaxing them to give much larger gifts, and by conveying the message to your supporters in the most intimate way available to you that their support really matters. Fees charged by telephone fundraising ﬁrms vary greatly, and each ﬁrm seems to have its own peculiar list of inclusions and exclusions from the base rate. They tend to run from about $3.50 per donor contacted to $6 or more (to as much as $12 per contact in a high-dollar program. Experience and levels of talent also vary. Chances are, you’ll get what you pay for. You’re not likely to ﬁnd any bargains. Cost is only one of a great many issues to consider about telephone fundraising. Normally, you can lower the cost by limiting the duration of the contact (the script), by cheapening the quality of the printed materials sent to those who pledge to contribute, by avoiding “lead letters” or postcards to the donors you’re going to call, and by simplifying the methods and terms of collecting payments. It may or may not be smart for you to do any of these things. When you look around the telephone fundraising ﬁeld, you should also ﬁnd out whether a ﬁrm you’re considering is properly registered to do business in the states where your donors live. More than forty states require fundraising ﬁrms to register. Many also require that ﬁrms ﬁle advance notices of scheduled solicitations. Regulation of telephone fundraising has become a controversial issue of considerable staying power, and I’m sure you’ll agree it’s essential to conduct your affairs with scrupulous regard for both legal and ethical standards.

••• OK. Now you know enough about the use of the telephone in fundraising to venture a little further along the way toward integrated, multichannel fundraising. That’s the topic of the following chapter.

12 Legacy Giving

F

or many years now, the fundraising profession has been awash in scholarly studies, econometric projections, educated guesswork, and sheer wishful thinking about the immense sums of money that will pass from one generation to the next in the opening decades of the twenty-ﬁrst century: $10 trillion? $40 trillion? $100 trillion? Just pick a number, and start scratching out on the back of an envelope how many millions your organization will receive in the form of planned gifts in the next ten years. The mind boggles! Once you catch your breath, however, you’ll confront a somewhat less exhilarating reality. First, the yearbook Giving USA 2003: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2002 (p. 8) estimates that bequests during calendar year 2002 totaled approximately $18.1 billion—a tidy sum in anyone’s book. But that ﬁgure represented just 7.5 percent of charitable giving in 2002, dramatically below the potential suggested by current wealth transfers. And Giving USA 2002 revealed that giving by bequest generally trended upward during the previous three decades. But after adjustments for inﬂation, the increase averaged just 1.5 percent per year from 1971 through 2001. Currently in the United States, according to Planned Giving in the United States 2000: A Survey of Donors, conducted by the National Committee on Planned Giving, only about 8 percent of those who have written wills have provided for legacy gifts, whether in the form of simple bequests in their wills or estate plans or embodied in more complex charitable trusts. To an optimist like me, this suggests

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an endless capacity for growth. But only a fool would suggest it’s easy to persuade people to include charities in their estate plans. Dig a little deeper into this reality, and you’ll learn that professionals in the fastgrowing ﬁeld of gift planning lavish most of their attention on rich people—the sorts of people who might yield multi-million-dollar charitable trusts. Clearly, they’re responding to Willie Sutton’s insight that money isn’t spread around equally in our society. In some circumstances, that single-minded focus on people of considerable means makes a great deal of sense: for example, at a hospital with a narrow donor base, the very best use of a planned giving ofﬁcer’s time might well be to split his time among a few dozen wealthy prospects. But in a nonproﬁt organization with a broad base of donors or members acquired and cultivated by mail, that approach can be counterproductive. In such circumstances, donors of modest means may be “where the money is.” According to planned giving specialist Robert F. Sharpe Jr., the average bequest in the United States is approximately $35,000—an amount that qualiﬁes as a major gift at just about any nonproﬁt organization. But few such bequests come from major donors. In fact, in-depth research conducted by Northwestern University in the mid-1990s revealed that there is no correlation between wealth and the likelihood of leaving a legacy. In fact, the Northwestern studies show that planned giving prospects deﬁed detection apart from the most obvious criterion—age. And almost anyone familiar with the giving patterns revealed by computer studies of donor history knows that bequests are most likely to come from direct-mail-acquired donors who gave cash gifts of less than $100 in their lifetimes—often substantially less than $100. It’s not at all unusual for a long-time $10 or $15 donor—perhaps even one who lapsed for several years just before passing away—to leave a $25,000 bequest or even one for $250,000. The potential for raising substantial amounts of money from bequests is enormous. In a poll of donor attitudes conducted in March 2003 by Lang Research (Toronto, Ontario) for Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc., and The FLA Group, using a sample of ﬁve hundred U.S. donors and ﬁve hundred Canadian, 99 percent of American donors and 97 percent of Canadian donors asserted that they were aware of legacy giving as an option, and most of them—64 percent in the United States and 48 percent in Canada—said they thought legacy giving was a good idea. In fact, 78 percent of Americans and 47 percent of Canadians had already been asked to consider legacy gifts, and about one in three of them (23 percent in the United States, 16 percent in Canada) said they had already agreed to name a charity in their wills or estate plans. A further 29 percent of Americans

Legacy Giving

and 18 percent of Canadians indicated that they are at least somewhat likely to do so in the future. That’s where direct mail comes into the picture in legacy giving.

Setting Your Strategy for Legacy Giving Broadly speaking, there are three approaches you can pursue in hopes of securing legacy gifts: 1. Sit around and wait. Eventually, if your fundraising program is large enough, and if you maintain a sizable donor base, bequests are likely to ﬂoat in over the transom. Depending on your organization’s mission and track record, there might even be quite a few such bequests. 2. Hire a planned giving staff. Put them on the road to talk to your organization’s major donors to discuss estate planning opportunities that will be beneﬁcial for the donors as well as for you. If you have a big enough pool of major donors, and if your planned giving ofﬁcers are both skillful and patient enough, you may eventually obtain a few truly sizable legacy gifts. 3. Promote legacy giving throughout your donor ﬁle. Target those whose age and giving history make them the likeliest candidates for bequests in the foreseeable future. Although this approach isn’t liable to generate signiﬁcant revenue in the short term, over the long haul it can prove very lucrative indeed. Clearly, these three approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. Strategy B implies Strategy A, at least so far as the overwhelming majority of the donors are concerned. And Strategy C is entirely compatible with Strategy B. In fact, that combination of B and C probably represents the soundest approach for most large, well-established nonproﬁts. However, for the overwhelming majority of individual-donor-based nonproﬁt organizations in North America, Strategy C is the surest road to success in securing legacy gifts. And that strategy is based on putting to work specialized direct response techniques—chieﬂy, direct mail. For many of the nonproﬁts that have been most successful in obtaining bequests from their donors, the starting point in the promotion process was to conduct research into the attitudes of legacy gift prospects. After all, you may be

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able to guess how your donors view your organizations, but you won’t know unless you ask them. Focus groups designed to unearth their attitudes about your work and about legacy giving are an ideal way to begin the process of promoting legacy gifts. For many nonproﬁts, the second step is to launch a special form of giving club called a heritage or legacy society.

Launching a Legacy Society Donors of $1,000 or more are admitted into membership in a high-dollar giving club in many nonproﬁt organizations. Is it any wonder, then, that donors who commit to legacy gifts, frequently amounting to tens or hundreds of times as much money, are honored by admission to a similar group that confers special beneﬁts and privileges? A heritage or legacy society may offer its members any one or more of a great variety of beneﬁts, including the following: • A lapel pin or other emblem of afﬁliation • Exclusive, members-only gatherings with prestigious speakers or members of the organization’s board of directors • An informative newsletter that honors selected members of the society and keeps them up-to-date on new wrinkles in estate planning • Recognition in the organization’s donor newsletter, annual report, or at special events See Exhibit 12.1 for an example of a response device included in a legacy promotion mailing, which illustrates the beneﬁts of membership in a legacy society. It’s worth giving serious thought to the name of your legacy society. Although the Brand X approach—calling it The Legacy Society or The Heritage Society—is a perfectly defensible choice, you may enhance the attractiveness of your legacy society by assigning a name with more cachet. Choosing the name of your revered founder or long-time chief executive may help to induce many donors to commit to legacy gifts that will honor an old friend. Picking a name that reminds donors of your mission may have a similar, motivating effect (Stewards of the Earth, for example, or The Beethoven Society). If yours is a local or regional organization, and you’re planning special events for the members of your heritage society, you might consider launching the effort at a public gathering of your donors. At such an event, you might honor those who have already notiﬁed you of their intention to include you in their wills or living trusts (with their express permission, of course).

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EXHIBIT 12.1. Insert from a Legacy Society Promotion Mailing. Source: NARAL Pro-Choice America. Reproduced with permission.

Creating a Legacy Newsletter If a launch event isn’t practical for your organization, the inaugural effort may well be the premier issue of a newsletter created for the members of your legacy society. In any case, a legacy newsletter mailed two, three, or four times annually can be a key component in an effective legacy marketing program. The contents of such a newsletter might include any or all of the following items: • • • • • •

A page devoted to listing the members of the legacy society One or more interviews with legacy donors, along with photos An article illustrating how one legacy gift was put to work A brief message from the executive director Tips on estate planning from a qualiﬁed attorney or accountant A coupon that may be mailed to request more information or to declare interest in arranging for a legacy gift Exhibit 12.2 shows the contents of a planned giving newsletter.

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EXHIBIT 12.2. One Page from the “Legacy of Hope” Newsletter. Source: Bread for the World. Reproduced with permission.

Legacy Giving

Many, perhaps most, planned giving newsletters include articles with technical details about various forms of charitable trusts. There’s no end to the legal variations on these devices, so there’s lots of material you can generate. But my advice to you is simple: don’t do it! Every bit of research I’ve ever encountered about the motivations of planned giving donors makes it clear that there is one overarching consideration in donors’ minds when they consider a bequest, and it’s not death or taxes: it’s your organization’s mission. The U.S. tax laws are full of loopholes that allow a donor with a clever tax accountant to avoid tax in myriad ways without leaving you a legacy. It’s extremely unlikely that you’ll secure a planned gift of any type from a donor unless she shares your passion for your mission. Let your planned giving ofﬁcers discuss the arcane details of gift planning with your donors’ attorneys or tax advisors, but don’t befuddle them by writing about this supremely confusing ﬁeld in your legacy society newsletter. At ﬁrst, there will be few legacy society members—only those who have previously committed to legacy gifts. They will, of course, receive copies of the newsletter. Equally important, however: so will those in the target group of donors you select for bequest promotion.

Selecting the Target Audience for Legacy Giving In the broadest perspective, all donors are possible sources of legacy gifts. But just as we distinguish between “suspects” and “prospects” in donor acquisition programs, it’s wise to focus our attention on those donors who are mostly likely to consider writing bequests into their wills or estate plans. The ﬁrst criterion to consider in targeting donors for bequest promotion is age. It’s foolish to include anyone younger than ﬁfty or ﬁfty-ﬁve years old. Most organizations set the bar a little higher at sixty, sixty-ﬁve, or even seventy, depending on the size of their donor ﬁles and the amount of money budgeted to promote bequests. But a number of other criteria ought to be weighed. Experience shows that the following groups of donors have the highest propensity to leave legacies: • Monthly donors or sustainers • Donors who regularly give multiple gifts each year • Donors who were sustainers or who regularly gave multiple gifts each year but lapsed in recent years • Frequent donors who are also volunteers, including trustees • Frequent donors who have also made use of the organization’s services Please note that the size of a donor’s gifts is not included as a criterion here. A donor who has frequently given you $5 gifts two or three times a year for ten years

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is far more likely to leave you a legacy than someone who gave you $5,000 three years ago. Repeat this mantra to yourself: there is no correlation between wealth and legacy giving! In reality, the selection of prospects for a bequest promotion program can be a sophisticated matter. Specialists in this area may maintain proprietary software that weighs the relative weight of a variety of variables, including such factors as giving history and the nature of previous communications from donors to the organization. With a donor base of modest size, however, it’s a relatively simple matter to pick the obvious best prospects.

Cultivating and Educating Potential Legacy Donors Prudence demands that you do not project current income from legacy gifts unless your organization has a long-established history of receiving multiple bequests every year. Typically, it takes at least three years, perhaps ﬁve years or longer, before a bequest promotion program begins to bring a return on its investment. Patience is the byword. Any planned giving ofﬁcer—no less than any major gift ofﬁcer—will probably tell you that raising money in big chunks involves nine parts of cultivation to one part of solicitation. In most direct mail fundraising efforts, your objective is to secure funds that come from a donor’s current income stream. A bequest comes from a donor’s assets—a far different matter. Rich or poor, few of us are quick to part with our ﬁnancial assets. Few rules apply to legacy marketing, in part because such efforts are a relatively new phenomenon, and those who have gained experience in this specialized arena have tended not to share their experiences widely within the nonproﬁt sector. My own experience suggests that an optimal bequest promotion program should include the following elements: • One or more designated staff members prepared to follow up gift planning inquiries without delay • Printed materials linking legacy giving to the organization’s mission and vision • A carefully selected target group of prospects • A legacy society • A legacy society newsletter mailed two, three, or four times annually to members of the legacy society and targeted prospects • An annual letter softly suggesting the rewards of leaving a bequest to the organization (see Exhibit 12.3 for an example) • An annual letter suggesting that other (unspeciﬁed) gift planning options are available

Legacy Giving

181 EXHIBIT 12.3. Bequest Promotion Letter. Source: Bread for the World. Reproduced with permission.

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Additional legacy promotion efforts might include: • Mailings, phone calls, print advertisements, and possibly other efforts to persuade allied professionals (attorneys, accountants, ﬁnancial planners, bankers) to keep the organization in mind when helping clients with estate planning • Estate planning seminars conducted by allied professionals or planned giving staff members • Advertisements in newspapers, magazines, or a charity’s own internal publications for charitable gift annuities (if the organization offers them) A legacy marketing program can be as extensive or as limited as you wish. But keep in mind that whether your program is extensive or limited in scope, cultivation is the key. Outright efforts to “sell” planned gifts are unlikely to be effective with more than a few prospects, and they could easily persuade many others to rule out your organization as a legacy gift possibility.

••• Cultivation, in fact, is the byword of any successful fundraising program. The phrase “relationship fundraising” refers to a development program that’s built on cultivation. That key concept is the subject of the following chapter.

13 Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

E

very single donor focus group I’ve ever witnessed has made it unmistakably clear that a typical donor

• • • •

Expects to be thanked for her gifts Is peeved when she’s not thanked swiftly Wants to know what her gifts have helped to accomplish Is often incensed when she receives a new solicitation before being thanked for her last gift

Extensive longitudinal research in major direct mail fundraising programs proves that, over time, the modest cost of gift acknowledgments is repaid many times over in increased donor loyalty and generosity. That’s right: donors who are promptly thanked for their gifts and kept well informed about the organization’s work give more gifts, more often, and they keep giving longer. A nonlinear perspective on the donor development cycle may make clear why this is so. (See Figure 13.1.) The “Donor Loyalty Cycle” portrayed here was developed by The Domain Group, a fundraising and marketing agency with ofﬁces in Seattle, Atlanta, London, and Paris. The Donor Loyalty Cycle skillfully shows the need for never-ending communications and cultivation in relationships with donors—a principle that provides a perfect segue into the subject of “donorcentered fundraising.”

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FIGURE 13.1. The Donor Loyalty Cycle. Motivate Repeat the cycle to build more loyalty and a relationship of trust. (Best vehicles: a continuing stream of effective communication that 5 presents your organization as vital, effective, and trustworthy.) Report Share your good news! Tell the donor she is making a difference. Be as specific as possible. (Best vehicles: newsletters, special reports, gift acknowledgment/receipt packages.)

4

Create Awareness Make donors and prospects aware of urgent needs, plus the negative consequences of needs not being met. (Best vehicles: appeal packages and newsletters.) 1

Donor Loyalty Cycle

Ask Ask for donor involvement: financial gifts, volunteer time, ideas, advocacy. Your donor 2 takes a significant step toward loyalty at this point. (Best vehicles: appeal packages, newsletters, outbound telemarketing.)

3

Acknowledge and Affirm Praise your donors for their involvement and recognize their participation in helping to meet the urgent need presented. (Best vehicles: gift acknowledgment/receipt packages, special "touchpoint" notes and phone calls.) Source: © 2003 The Domain Group, Inc. Reproduced with permission.

Canadian fundraiser Penelope Burk’s careful studies of donor attitudes conﬁrm these ﬁndings. If you want an earful about the fundamental importance of speedy and appropriate donor acknowledgments, read her two books on the subject: Thanks! A Guide to Donor-Centred Fundraising (2000), which deals with her research in Canada, and Donor Centered Fundraising: How to Hold On to Your Donors and Raise Much More Money (2003), which covers the United States. The problem this research addresses is the most fundamental in direct response fundraising today in North America. In the United States, for example, the typical direct mail fundraising program succeeds in renewing no more than one in three (roughly 25 to 35 percent) ﬁrst-time donors. Is that any wonder—when that same “typical” direct mail fundraising program is likely to get thank-yous into its donors’ hands no sooner than about six weeks following the receipt of a gift? An effective direct mail fundraising program begins and ends with a prompt and heartfelt thank-you.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

The Dos and Don’ts of Thank-You Letters At ﬁrst glance, you might easily conclude that sending donor acknowledgments is a simple matter. After all, what’s involved but sending a postcard or a letter acknowledging a donor’s gift and getting it into the mail in short order? In practice, however, especially in a direct mail fundraising program that attracts thousands of gifts per year, sending thank-yous can be a challenging task. Any one of a number of complications might arise, such as the following: • Gifts are processed sporadically (for example, by a volunteer who works just one day a week). • Gifts are handled by an off-site vendor that may not be capable of sending thank-yous or not inclined to send them as soon as you’d like. • Budget pressures require using bulk-rate postage, thus slowing down the process by requiring acknowledgments to be sent in bundles of two hundred letters or more at a time. • Gifts from a large number of different appeals are received simultaneously. However, the biggest complication of all is typically the reluctance of the CEO, CFO, or board of directors to spend the money necessary to deliver the sort of thank-yous donors crave. Your ﬁrst challenge, then, may be to make a powerful case for the cost-effectiveness of a well-run donor acknowledgment program. Once you’ve sold the program, you can turn your attention to technical matters. Start your planning (or your evaluation of the existing donor acknowledgment procedures) with the understanding that the ideal thank-you includes the following features. It • Is mailed within twenty-four hours of receipt of the gift • Is personalized (ideally is handwritten or at least contains a handwritten postscript) • Is written with warmth, in a personal style • Cites the amount of the gift and the date it was received • Refers to the speciﬁc issue or project that prompted the gift • Does not ask for another gift • Promises information (to come later) about how the gift was used • Bears the signature of the chief executive • Is hand-signed (though not necessarily by the CEO) • Is mailed in a closed-face envelope without a teaser • Includes a receipt for income tax reporting • Bears a ﬁrst-class commemorative stamp

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• Invites the donor to write or call with any questions or concerns and includes the signer’s phone number and e-mail address Exhibit 13.1 shows a personalized new-gift thank-you letter. Admittedly, it’s not always possible for a nonproﬁt organization to follow all thirteen of these guidelines in its thank-you program. For budgetary or other reasons, it may be necessary to set priorities and settle for far less than the ideal combination. If so, consider the four most important features of an effective donor acknowledgment system: 1. Promptness: 24-hour turnaround is better than 48, which is better than 72 or 96. A week or ten days pushes the limit. Three weeks is far too long for a donor to wait to be thanked. And don’t even think about sending thank-yous that take longer to get into the mail. 2. Warmth: Show your appreciation. Acknowledge the donor’s thoughtfulness, generosity, and concern. Don’t send your donors a letter that could have been written by a committee of lawyers at the IRS. 3. Personalization: Cite the amount and the date of the gift. Be speciﬁc, and be personal. 4. Accountability: Explain what the gift will be used for, what feedback the donor can expect, and when. To meet these criteria, you will likely have to adopt a system that integrates caging (recording gifts), cashiering (depositing the money), and acknowledging donors in one smooth, continuous process. The need for speed will probably rule out a separate caging and cashiering operation. (However, it may be possible for the cager to e-mail information about newly received gifts on a daily basis to whomever prepares the gift acknowledgments.) It’s most desirable to use ﬁrst-class postage on thank-you letters, not only because that ensures faster delivery but because it allows for the mail to be forwarded (in the event that a donor has just moved or has used a check that contains her old address). There’s another reason ﬁrst-class postage makes sense: many donors are favorably impressed that you thought their gifts important enough to warrant a ﬁrst-class stamp. In many fundraising programs, the treatment accorded a donor depends on the size of his gifts. For instance, see the hypothetical program design represented in Table 13.1. Be careful! Three questionable practices are represented in Table 13.1: (1) the use of generic rather than personalized text in acknowledgments mailed to donors

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

March 26, 2003 Mr. Mal Warwick 123 Any Street Any Town, AS 00000

EXHIBIT 13.1. Personalized New-Gift Thank-You Letter. Source: Children International. Reproduced with permission.

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TABLE 13.1. Donor Acknowledgment Levels in a Hypothetical Fundraising Program. Amount of Gift

Nature of Thank-You

$1,000+

Personalized, hand-signed, ﬁrst-class thank-you from CEO plus thank-you call from chief development ofﬁcer*

$100–$999

Personalized, hand-signed, ﬁrst-class thank-you from CEO

$25–$99

Generic, bulk-rate thank-you from CEO

< $25

No acknowledgment

*Would also apply if a $1,000+ donor has just sent a smaller amount than $1,000.

of $25–$99 gifts, (2) the use of bulk-rate rather than ﬁrst-class postage for these donors, and (3) the omission of acknowledgments in response to all gifts of less than $25. Distinctions such as these are understandable and may even be necessary in some circumstances, and (under most circumstances) I have few qualms about omitting gifts of, say, less than $10 from a thank-you program, because I understand how powerful budget-cutting pressures may be. However, keep in mind that $10 donors can just as often leave substantial bequests as $100 donors! So, to the extent that it’s possible to avoid these cost-cutting (and perhaps time-saving) measures, I recommend doing so. Another cost-cutting measure that’s sometimes employed in the name of efﬁciency is to use postcards instead of letters as donor acknowledgments. I regard this practice as a last resort, acceptable only if doing so is the only thing that will make possible a speedy response to a gift. The disadvantages of this technique should be obvious: postcards aren’t personal, they make it impossible to cite the speciﬁc date and amount of a gift, they rarely reﬂect warmth, and they’re not even private. Many donors are reluctant to allow the letter-carrier or other postal personnel to know whom they’re giving money to. And I, for one, don’t blame them. However, to even this rule, the occasional hand-signed postcard is the exception that can always be found. If you want to express appreciation to a new donor, a thank-you letter is a natural and necessary technique. But as many fundraising practitioners have discovered in recent years, a simple thank-you sometimes isn’t enough. The so-called welcome package has developed as a supplement to (and occasionally a substitute for) a thank-you letter.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

The Welcome Package You’ve just sent a $35 check, your ﬁrst gift, to the Center for Humanity’s Progress. It seemed like a good idea at the time: the Center’s membership invitation was credible and compelling, giving you the impression that its work was breaking new ground in human relations. You’d never heard about the Center for Humanity’s Progress before, but that was, in a way, an advantage rather than a disadvantage. It comes across as an innovative new venture addressing long-neglected needs, and $35 seems like a modest enough vote of conﬁdence in the Center’s mission. Good enough. But now what? What will it take to persuade you to send the Center a second gift? If the Center treats you the way so many other nonproﬁt organizations have treated you over the years, the chances you’ll send that second gift are slim: no thank-you (or one that comes so late it’s worse than none at all). But let’s assume that the Center for Humanity’s Progress is starting out on the right foot and has mailed a heartfelt thank-you within a couple of days of receiving your membership contribution. The letter addresses you personally, cites the amount and the date of your gift, acknowledges your willingness to support its innovative mission, and promises that Center staff will keep in touch with you in the future. The upshot is that you know little or nothing more than you knew when you read the Center’s acquisition letter, but you feel good about having given that $35. But the next $35 will be tougher to coax from you. Typically, your next contact with the Center for Humanity’s Progress is likely to be a special appeal. In this solicitation, the Center’s staff requests your support—another $35, $50, $75, or more— for one of its top-priority projects. However, it just so happens that you have zero interest in that particular project. In fact, you began losing interest when you noticed it mentioned in the membership invitation. You don’t regard that project as innovative—or even desirable—at all. Under the circumstances, what are the chances you’ll contribute again to the Center? Nil? Or if the Center’s lucky, perhaps a little better? What if, instead of an immediate appeal for additional funds, you received a package containing the following items? • A second letter of appreciation and welcome as a member of the Center for Humanity’s Progress, including information about the Center’s Web site and an invitation to subscribe to its free electronic newsletter • A brochure describing the Center’s programs, listing its key accomplishments, and explaining how to obtain additional, up-to-date information

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• A copy of the Center’s most recent annual report • A brief questionnaire about your priorities as a donor and about how frequently you wish to be solicited • A brochure that describes the Center’s legacy society and its monthly giving program, explains the ease and convenience of giving via credit card or preauthorized checking, and describes its $1,000-a-year giving society and the beneﬁts it affords members • A copy of the Donor Bill of Rights (see Exhibit 13.2) • A business reply envelope in which to return the completed questionnaire and send any questions or comments you may wish to send A welcome package like this and the contents described are just samples of innumerable possibilities that could well make the difference between persuading you to send that second gift or writing off the Center for Humanity’s Progress as a lost cause. And this may well be the case, even if you also receive that annoying appeal for funds for a program you don’t respect. Packages like these don’t come cheap. It may cost you two or three dollars or even more to send such a package. But consider this: if your acquisition cost is, say, $10 per donor, you would increase that cost by no more than 30 or 40 percent. And my experience suggests that your renewal rate would jump by a far larger percentage. Your own welcome package will necessarily take into account your organization’s unique circumstances. Ideally, it should reﬂect the views of your donors themselves, as revealed in focus groups or other market research efforts. The resulting package might be much slimmer than the package I’ve described—or much fatter. But the chances are that if you do a good job giving your donors at the outset the sort of information they want about your organization and setting the context for their giving, they’ll be far more favorably disposed to you as the months and years go on. Exhibit 13.3 depicts the contents of a modest newmember welcome package. It would be a mistake, though, to conclude that the job of cultivating your donors ends with a welcome package. In fact, the process of relationship building has barely begun at that point.

Four Phases of Fundraising In Chapter Seven, I discussed the four stages of a donor’s life. To refresh your memory and to put a slightly different spin on that matter, I’ll restate those four stages in terms of the Four Phases of Fundraising, or the Four I’s: (1) identify, (2) involve, (3) inform, and (4) invest.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

Donor Bill of Rights Philanthropy is based on voluntary action for the common good. It is a tradition of giving and sharing that is primary to the quality of life. To assure that philanthropy merits the respect and trust of the general public, and that donors and prospective donors can have full conﬁdence in the not-for-proﬁt organizations and causes they are asked to support, we declare that all donors have these rights: 1. To be informed of the organization’s mission, of the way the organization intends to use donated resources, and of its capacity to use donations effectively for their intended purposes. 2. To be informed of the identity of those serving on the organization’s governing board, and to expect the board to exercise prudent judgment in its stewardship responsibilities. 3. To have access to the organization’s most recent ﬁnancial statements. 4. To be assured their gifts will be used for the purposes for which they were given. 5. To receive appropriate acknowledgment and recognition. 6. To be assured that information about their donations is handled with respect and with conﬁdentiality to the extent provided by law. 7. To expect that all relationships with individuals representing organizations of interest to the donor will be professional in nature. 8. To be informed whether those seeking donations are volunteers, employees of the organization or hired solicitors. 9. To have the opportunity for their names to be deleted from mailing lists that an organization may intend to share. 10. To feel free to ask questions when making a donation and to receive prompt, truthful and forthright answers. The text of this statement in its entirety was developed by the American Association of Fund-Raising Counsel (AAFRC), Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP), Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), and the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP).

EXHIBIT 13.2. The Donor Bill of Rights. Source: Copyright 2003, Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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EXHIBIT 13.3. New-Member Welcome Package Letter.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

EXHIBIT 13.3. New-Member Welcome Package Letter, Cont’d.

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The following information is optional.

EXHIBIT 13.3. New-Member Welcome Package Letter, Cont’d.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

EXHIBIT 13.3. New-Member Welcome Package Letter, Cont’d. Source: National Council of La Raza. Reproduced with permission.

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Identify This is the acquisition stage. You identify prospective donors from among countless “suspects,” and, once you approach them, a certain number raise their hands to express interest in your cause or institution. In other words, they identify themselves. Naturally, what you do in response to this expression of interest is critical. If you fail to show appreciation for a donor’s ﬁrst gift, and promptly so, he’s very likely to lose interest.

Involve If the average direct mail donor in North America supports fourteen organizations per year, as my researches have shown, is it reasonable to assume that she will continue to support all fourteen nonproﬁts year after year? No. Because other research ﬁndings make it clear that donors frequently switch loyalties. The deplorable statistics on donor attrition alone are enough to prove that point. To lessen attrition and increase the chances that a donor will stick with you for years to come, you need to involve her in your organization, and that process begins with a well-crafted welcome package. Involvement might consist of volunteer work, if your organization offers volunteer opportunities; it might include some sort of activist participation, in a grassroots lobbying campaign, for example; it could entail visits to your ofﬁce or ﬁeld projects, brieﬁngs, tours, informal gatherings with staff, telephone conference calls to update donors on your work, dedicated members- or donorsonly pages on your Web site, or anything else your imagination devises. An involved donor is immeasurably less likely to become a lapsed donor.

Inform In simpler days, before the advent of electronic communications, the average person wasn’t subjected to a seemingly endless stream of so-called information (most of it’s undigested data, really) on a daily basis. (Imagine, there was even a time in human history when a single individual could hope to read every single book printed in the world during his lifetime!) Nowadays, an educated person can be pressured to read tens of thousands of words a day, including e-mail messages, electronic newsletters, Web site postings, letters, memos, magazines, newspapers, and whatever else might impinge on his world, not to mention books. Is it any wonder, then, that the fundraiser’s basic tool to keep donors informed—the quarterly or bimonthly newsletter—doesn’t work as well as it used to? Please understand: I’m not suggesting that you eliminate your newsletter. In fact, testing conducted by my clients suggests that a strong donor newsletter can

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

substantially lift renewal rates and average gifts. What I am suggesting is that a simple newsletter may not be enough. To ensure that your donors are kept fully up to date, you may need to be more creative, using some of the involvement techniques I cited immediately and not relying solely on your newsletter and the information in your special appeals. For example, a free electronic newsletter and an informative Web site are essential for most nonproﬁt organizations today. But you may have to go to even greater lengths to ensure that your donors are well informed, using one or more varieties of cultivation mailings. (See Table 13.2 for a guide to some common types of donor cultivation mailings and Exhibit 13.4 for an example of a letter from such a mailing.)

Invest The ultimate gift for any nonproﬁt organization is a legacy gift. Such a gift represents an investment by a donor in the future of your organization. At the same time, in a well-managed nonproﬁt, it also represents the return on an investment in cultivating and informing the donor and in inspiring her to leave a legacy.

TABLE 13.2. Examples of Cultivation Mailings. Format

Intended Audience

“Insider newsletter” 2–4 times annually

Monthly donors, high-dollar donors, major donors

Personalized letter from CEO or other key staff person 2–4 times annually

High-dollar donors, major donors

News-clippings highlighting major accomplishments as they occur

Monthly donors, all current active donors

Questionnaire offering donors opportunities to specify how and how often they wish to be solicited, what materials they wish to receive, and what donor services they wish to take advantage of

Any segment of the donor ﬁle, or all current active donors

Opinion surveys soliciting donors’ views and preferences about the organization’s program priorities

Any special segment of the donor ﬁle, or all current active donors

Complimentary copy of a book, booklet, or other product of the organization’s work, along with a personal note from the chief executive or other key person

High-dollar donors, major donors

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EXHIBIT 13.4. Letter from a Cultivation Mailing.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

EXHIBIT 13.4. Letter from a Cultivation Mailing, Cont’d.

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EXHIBIT 13.4. Letter from a Cultivation Mailing, Cont’d.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

EXHIBIT 13.4. Letter from a Cultivation Mailing, Cont’d. Source: Paciﬁc School of Religion. Reproduced with permission.

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Through all four phases of the donor development process, direct mail is an indispensable tool. The mail is most frequently used to recruit new donors; it’s an excellent way to promote involvement opportunities; it’s essential as a way to deliver printed information about an organization’s work; and it’s equally useful (in combination with efforts through other channels) in promoting legacy giving. Thus, regardless of the stage of a donor’s relationship with your organization and regardless of the level of his giving, direct mail will serve you well in helping you develop a mutually satisfying relationship.

Donor-Centered Fundraising The craft of direct mail fundraising grew out of what used to be called direct mail marketing, best known to the general public as junk mail: junk, because all too often it advertises goods or services the recipient has absolutely no interest in; junk, because more often than not it’s cheaply and obviously mass-produced; junk, because in its blatant commercialism and gaudy use of color and graphics, it’s frequently tasteless. Most direct mail fundraisers (like direct marketers in general) bridle at the mention of junk mail. The truth is, however, many direct mail fundraising appeals still richly deserve to be described as junk mail. The names and addresses of the intended recipients are often misspelled or long out of date. The criteria used to select prospects are frequently fanciful, at best. The messages are poorly crafted. The appeals reek of commercialism, dominated by cheap and frequently inappropriate premiums. Any resemblance between direct mail appeals like these and the pursuit of philanthropy is strictly coincidental. That’s why I believe it’s important to distinguish between the marketer’s approach to direct mail fundraising and the fundraiser’s approach. The marketer tends to think in terms of positioning, of broadcasting messages, of the organization’s needs, of statistics, of market share and market penetration. The fundraiser, by contrast, focuses on building relationships with donors (see Table 13.3). In reality, of course, my colleagues and I blend both approaches. The discipline of marketing has produced an accumulation of shrewd observations and insights about human behavior, and it offers useful guidance in analyzing results. We would be fools to reject all that. Direct mail is, after all, a form of marketing that has proven itself so useful because (1) it enables us to communicate with lots of people at the same time, and (2) many of its results are measurable. What is distinctive about the approach that we (and some other direct mail fundraisers) pursue is that we seek to put the donor at the center of our universe. This perspective requires what Ken Burnett, the celebrated author of Relationship Fundraising (2002) and its sequels, calls the “90-degree shift.” He is fond of

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

TABLE 13.3. Two Approaches to Direct Mail Fundraising. The Marketer’s Approach

The Fundraiser’s Approach

How can I position the organization to gain the broadest possible public support?

How can I best inspire donors to provide generous, continuing support for the organization?

What message can I deliver that will maximize response within our chosen market?

How can I communicate with my donors, taking into account all that I know about them individually, to build the strongest possible relationships with them?

How can I describe the organization and its needs, its history and its mission, in the most compelling way?

How can I best relate the mission and the goals of the organization to our donors in terms of their values, beliefs, and aspirations?

How can I achieve optimum costeffectiveness, generating the size and number of gifts that will maximize revenue at an acceptable cost?

How can I minimize donor attrition, maximize donor retention and upgrading, and nurture relationships with my donors that will maximize their loyalty?

How can I maximize market penetration and market share?

How can I provide ideal opportunities for my donors—and for prospective new donors—to validate their values, beliefs, and aspirations by supporting the work of my organization?

drawing an analogy between fundraising and marketing, citing the difference between the brand manager’s challenge and that of the customer relationship manager. The brand manager at the W. K. Kellogg Company—the cornﬂakes people— must sell as many boxes of Frosted Flakes as he possibly can to meet his monthly or quarterly target. By contrast, the customer relationship manager’s goal is to increase Kellogg’s share of the eleven thousand boxes of dry cereal you may buy in your lifetime. The difference reﬂects a 90-degree shift in perspective, and that represents the difference between what I refer to as the marketer’s and the fundraiser’s approaches. In my view, the concept of relationship fundraising popularized by Ken Burnett is based on ﬁve assumptions: 1. Most donors are generous and caring people. They want to help, and the fundraiser’s job is to inspire them to avail themselves of opportunities to do so.

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2. Most donors are also intelligent. They usually know when they’re being taken advantage of, and they don’t like it. 3. Most donors expect to be treated courteously and are offended when they’re not. 4. Donors are as varied in their interests and habits. Some of them demand opportunities to express their individual preferences and to be treated as the individuals they are. All of them appreciate such treatment. 5. We are missing a huge number of opportunities if we don’t operate a donorcentered approach, particularly if we persist in sending people what we want them to have rather than what they want to receive (which is not at all the same thing). Burnett’s individual perspectives aside, these ﬁve points form the basis of my thinking about fundraising. They help explain why I insist on placing such emphasis on thank-you letters and welcome packages, why I employ personalization as often as possible in appeals to current donors, and why I feel it’s critical to build appeals around the beneﬁts to the donor rather than the needs of the organization. If you accept these ﬁve premises, then you’ll think about your development program in a holistic fashion, taking into account all the communications from your organization to your donors—not just those appeals your own department produces. The bimonthly newsletter counts, too. So do the quarterly magazine, the annual report, the legacy marketing materials from the planned giving department, the invitations to special events, and whatever else might be included in the communications stream your donors may receive in the course of a year. If you want to put the donor at the center of your universe, you’ll analyze this stream of messages, research which items donors want to receive and which ones they don’t, and revise the fundraising and communication program accordingly. But it’s not enough to break down the vertical barriers separating your department from all the other ofﬁces that independently communicate with your donors. You’ll also need to eliminate the horizontal barriers that, in so many nonproﬁt organizations, rigidly separate donors by giving level. Such divisions are well intended. For example, by segregating upper-level donors in a “major gifts ofﬁce,” extra-special donors are guaranteed extra-special treatment. However, all too often this treatment means that these donors are excluded from the beneﬁt of the messages you have crafted so carefully to inspire them to give. I have seen countless cases in which major donors—deﬁned as those whose individual gifts reach the $1,000, $5,000, or $10,000 level—are removed from the direct mail or membership rolls and stop receiving most of the printed materials that succeeded so brilliantly in inspiring them to become major donors. If you truly subscribe to the concept of donor-centered fundraising, you’ll never make such a mistake.

Thank-Yous, Welcome Packages, and Cultivation Mailings

••• Now, with the basic concepts of direct mail fundraising under our belts, we can take a more informed look at the current state of the art in raising money by mail today—and at its prospects in the decades ahead. Please join me now in Part Three, “Direct Mail Fundraising Today and Tomorrow.”

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PART THREE

Direct Mail Fundraising Today and Tomorrow

T

he next two chapters examine the evolution of direct mail fundraising. Chapter Fourteen delves into the state of the art of fundraising today, placing direct mail squarely in the center of the new multichannel communications programs that successful nonproﬁts are developing and describing “integrated fundraising”—the new big-picture approach that enables fundraisers to make the most of today’s varied communications options. Chapter Fifteen wraps up Part Three with a discussion of twelve social, economic, and political trends that promise to affect the practice of fundraising and the development of the nonproﬁt sector in the decades ahead.

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14 Mastering the New Media Mix

O

ne of the hallmarks of our age is the continuing explosion of new communications technologies. Surely, there’s no end in sight to the spectacular inventiveness (and boundless greed) that has given rise to an unending stream of ever-more-amazing gadgets and devices. Today, at least in theory, the enterprising fundraiser can use any or all of the following channels of communications with her donors, prospects, or the general public: • Direct dialogue. In Europe, Australia, and elsewhere around the world, nonproﬁt organizations are already making extensive use of solicitors trained to engage passers-by on busy city streets and in shopping malls. The technique is employed almost exclusively to enroll monthly donors, because its high overhead costs prohibit its use to solicit single gifts. • Co-op mailings. There are two types of co-op mailings, neither of which has proven worthwhile for more than a handful of fundraisers: (1) packets of product promotions mailed weekly to consumers throughout the United States by Advo and other commercial companies, and (2) mailings jointly undertaken by nonproﬁt organizations that include appeals for all the participants.

This chapter incorporates material originally published in Fundraising on the Internet: The ePhilanthropy Foundation.Org’s Guide to Success Online, coedited with Ted Hart and Nick Allen (2002).

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• Direct mail. The most widely used of many direct response methods, direct mail is typically most effective when applied to donors of modest gifts. • Door-to-door canvassing. This form of face-to-face solicitation was once widely employed in the United States. It has become much less common in recent years, largely because of the difﬁculty most nonproﬁts have experienced in renewing canvass-recruited donors. • E-mail. Free electronic newsletters are fast becoming a standard feature in successful direct response fundraising programs. Sometimes an e-newsletter can be a useful vehicle to deliver an on-line solicitation. • Face-to-face contact. Direct solicitation is the oldest and still the best way to raise money from individuals. For most nonproﬁts, ﬁnancial realities dictate that face-to-face solicitation must be limited to major donors. However, for most organizations a major gifts program is absolutely essential. • Magazines. As the magazine ﬁeld has evolved from the mass-appeal magazines of the ﬁfties (Life, Look, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post) into today’s highly segmented and specialized offerings, and as advertising rates have climbed along the way, it has become increasingly difﬁcult for fundraisers to recruit new donors via ads in magazines. • Newspapers. Currently, newspaper advertising is not extensively used as a fundraising device in North America, where advertising costs have become prohibitive for most purposes. The exceptions are ads placed to raise funds in response to humanitarian emergencies or (occasionally) to support action on high-proﬁle public policy or environmental issues. In such circumstances, newspaper ads can be a cost-effective way to acquire new donors and are sometimes proﬁtable in their own right. Otherwise, this medium is not normally effective in fundraising. • Newspaper free-standing inserts. Every major Sunday newspaper includes a slew of commercial promotions—ﬂyers, pamphlets, brochures, and other advertising matter. These items are called free-standing inserts, or FSIs, and every once in a while a nonproﬁt organization will create and place one to recruit new donors. The technique is not widespread in the nonproﬁt sector, presumably because it has never consistently worked well for any organization. • Package inserts. Every once in a while, a corporate partnership will include an offer to include a small leaﬂet or brochure with goods shipped to customers. Occasionally, too, a utility company will consent to include a similar promotion in its monthly billing to customers. Such package inserts are rare today, however. In any case, response to package inserts is almost always vanishingly small. • Payroll deduction programs. Workplace giving is the source of much of the $3 billion raised annually by the United Ways throughout North America and has been adopted by other organizations that seek to direct funds toward specialized pur-

Mastering the New Media Mix

poses such as environmental causes, African American nonproﬁts, and women’s groups. Some larger charities pursue this channel of support on their own. • Radio. There are only two widespread uses of radio as a fundraising medium in the United States, as far as I’m aware: (1) short messages appealing for old cars, boats, or other vehicles for resale by charities and (2) appeals for funds by specialinterest organizations (usually religious), often not as stand-alone spots but within the stations’ programming. • Special events. After direct solicitation, special events are probably the world’s second-oldest type of fundraising. For many organizations, especially local groups or those who operate on a wider scale but maintain local chapters, they often work well. However, in all too many cases, special events are capital-intensive and risky. • Telemarketing. Like direct mail, telephone contact offers fundraisers a wide range of applications (which I’ll discuss later in this chapter). • Television. Although nonproﬁts addressing a wide range of issues have attempted to raise money through direct response television, their experience has been mixed, at best. Few organizations other than child-sponsorship groups have made a go of fundraising on television. (Direct response TV includes both “long form” infomercials, generally 30 or 60 minutes in length, and “short form” spots that are typically 60 or 120 seconds long. Both forms are typically aimed at recruiting new monthly donors.) • Text-messaging. Text-messaging uses cellular telephones or other wireless handheld devices to display short messages. This twenty-ﬁrst-century technique has been widely heralded for its fundraising potential but has yet to be adopted to any signiﬁcant degree in the United States. In Europe, Japan, and other countries where advanced wireless technology is the rule rather than the exception, fundraisers have taken notice and are experimenting with its use. • Web sites. Increasingly, donors are seeking information about the causes and institutions they support on the World Wide Web. Increasingly, nonproﬁts that previously depended largely on one channel— direct mail, most notably—are learning to diversify their donor communications by employing one or several additional channels among those listed. Most commonly, they choose telemarketing, major gifts, and special events. (Table 14.1 shows a three-year schedule for the direct mail and telephone fundraising projects in such a multichannel program.) There are several reasons for the growing popularity of this approach. First of all, the competition for charitable gifts has expanded at an eye-popping pace in the last couple of decades, not just in the United States, where the trend has gone the furthest, but in Canada, the United Kingdom, Western and Northern Europe, and

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TABLE 14.1. Three-Year Monthly Schedule for a Representative Fundraising Program.

Month

Acquisition Quantity

Renewal Quantity

Special Appeal Quantity

Newsletter Quantity

Telephone Quantity

Total

Year 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

50,000

500

50,500

500

500 500 100,000 1,000 1,500

500 100,000 1,000 1,500 150,000

1,500

151,500 2,000 3,000

2,000 3,000

Year 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

150,000

100,000

3,000 3,000 2,500 2,400 2,300

1,000 4,000 5,000

2,200 5,000

5,500 150,000 6,000 7,000 4,000

153,000 4,000 2,500 6,400 102,300 7,200 5,000 5,500 150,000 6,000 7,000 4,000

Year 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Total

250,000

100,000

8,000 8,000 6,500 5,800 5,500 5,300

5,000

258,000 8,000 6,500 16,800 105,500 12,800 17,000 9,000 200,000 24,000 11,000 5,000

16,200

1,437,000

11,000 7,500 12,000

5,000

9,000 200,000 10,000 11,000

1,250,000

41,300

62,000

14,000

67,500

Mastering the New Media Mix

almost everywhere else in the world where civil society is blooming. To be noticed these days, a nonproﬁt organization must take full advantage of all opportunities that arise to communicate its message. In addition, the volume of commercial advertising has reached staggering proportions, ﬂooding every sensory organ with unsolicited messages and compounding the difﬁculty nonproﬁts face to be heard above the din. And donors have personal preferences about the ways they wish to communicate with the charities they support; they’re becoming increasingly vocal about expressing those preferences. One size no longer ﬁts all. Another factor is that electronic means of communication are rapidly moving into the mainstream of our daily lives. Some people, including many donors, are spurning traditional communication channels in favor of e-mail and the Internet. And ﬁnally, the lower cost of electronic communications is attractive to nonproﬁt organizations, providing an incentive to cut back on the use of more traditional channels. As the twenty-ﬁrst century unfolds, it’s foolish for us fundraisers to limit ourselves to any one, or even three, communications channels. We have to seize every available opportunity to get our messages across. The strongest response to this reality is integrated fundraising.

The New World of Integrated Fundraising Once upon a time, a nonproﬁt organization could easily pigeonhole all its fundraising and marketing activities in separate, independent departments with familiar names, usually Major Gifts, Planned Giving, Direct Response (or Direct Mail or Membership), and Marketing (or Communications). When it was time to launch a capital campaign, a new Capital Campaign ofﬁce sprang into being. The staff in these departments typically took little or no notice of each other’s activities. That compartmentalized model is still the rule in the nonproﬁt sector, but it has long since outlived its effectiveness. Discerning fundraisers today understand that we function in the context of a complex and demanding reality that’s simply not amenable to such simple-minded approaches. First of all, shrinking donor-renewal rates make the case for relationship fundraising, which demands a donor-centered approach to donor communications (see the preceding chapter). To today’s well-educated donor, uncoordinated (and sometimes conﬂicting) messages from different departments are signs of poor planning, inefﬁciency, and waste. The bad impression thus created compounds the donor’s displeasure at not being promptly or adequately thanked. Second, most bequests—often the largest share of all planned giving revenue— come from donors recruited, renewed, and cultivated by direct mail. Nowadays,

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woe unto the planned giving ofﬁce that ignores or undervalues the potential in its small-donor or membership ﬁle! And so it is with major gifts. Of course, some major donors are recruited outright, face-to-face, without any previous history of ﬁnancial support for the organization. But those nonproﬁts that invest in donor care and careful stewardship have found, over the years, that growing numbers of donors recruited through the mail have eventually joined the ranks of their major donors. And ﬁnally, in many organizations there’s a sharp line drawn between the direct response or membership department and the major gifts ofﬁce. Donors who contribute less than $1,000, say, are the business of the direct mail team. But once a donor contributes his ﬁrst $1,000, he crosses the line into the domain of major gifts and is severed from the direct mail communications stream. The donor henceforth receives only those communications that come from the major gifts ofﬁce. There are two problems with this: (1) it was direct response communications that nurtured his interest in the organization and prompted his $1,000 gift in the ﬁrst place, and (2) major gift ofﬁcers may have their hands full dealing with donors of $5,000, $10,000, or more and give short shrift to those who have given lesser amounts. All too often, those $1,000 donors are left out in the cold and receive virtually no communications. Both these factors point to the value of blurring the line between direct response and major gifts and using reformatted and personalized materials developed for direct mail to help sustain the interest of major donors. The barriers that commonly exist among direct mail, telefundraising, and online communications cause similar problems. For example, imagine the bewilderment of a donor who receives a letter, a phone call, and an electronic newsletter within the same week from the same organization. Now imagine what she thinks when the messages delivered through these disparate channels are themselves very different. Am I exaggerating? Unfortunately not. This scenario is all too common. The case for integrated fundraising is there in plain sight for all who have eyes to see.

What Integrated Fundraising Means Today, integrated fundraising is a goal for most nonproﬁt organizations, not a reality. In fact, the concept of integrated fundraising is generally better known in the abstract—for the beneﬁts it brings as well as its drawbacks. In theory, integrated fundraising reduces inconsistencies in communicating an organization’s message, strengthens donor relationships, and yields increased revenue, especially over the long haul. The price that’s paid for these considerable beneﬁts includes added capital requirements, greater demands on management, and sophisticated skills to operate the more complex systems entailed in the process.

Mastering the New Media Mix

To describe what integrated fundraising is, it’s best to examine the idea from the ground up, by cataloging the eight principles that must be built into any serious effort to implement it. 1. Always consider the donor’s point of view. It’s a cliché that fundraising is about building relationships with donors, but precious few direct response fundraising programs put this wisdom into practice in more than a perfunctory way. An integrated approach to fundraising offers hope that donors’ unique interests and behaviors will form the basis of the relationships that develop between them and the causes they support. In practice, this means that the donor’s point of view must prevail. If she wants to contribute only once per year, if she doesn’t want to receive your newsletter, if she’s interested only in your work with cats, not dogs, if she doesn’t want to get your e-mail (or visit your Web site), then those must be the rules of the relationship. Within the limits of feasibility, each donor must have the opportunity to deﬁne her own dos and don’ts. 2. Focus on the big picture. Integrated fundraising puts special demands on nonproﬁt executives. Every donor counts; every relationship is precious. But a successful fundraising program is grounded in: • Thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of donors • A broad array of fundraising techniques using diverse communications channels • Management by a large number of staff persons, usually divided among several different ofﬁces or departments • Year-round activity maintained over decades Integrated fundraising involves all the tools and techniques for donor communications: direct mail, telemarketing, on-line communications, direct solicitations, capital campaigns, major donor fundraising, planned giving—from the bottom of the donor pyramid to the top. To succeed in integrated fundraising requires that the organization’s leadership keep all this in perspective, orchestrating all these elements in an artful fashion so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. This may entail revising employee incentives, placing emphasis on organizationwide achievements rather than those of the individual department, as well as a new style of leadership and intensive staff training, so that everyone involved in development works smoothly together. 3. Keep your message clear and consistent. In recent years, fundraisers have begun to absorb the lessons that successful marketers in the private sector have learned about “branding.” This widely misunderstood buzzword is actually a variant on the fundraising concept of relationship building. To establish a brand is to

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create a total experience, for the customer or the donor alike, that’s both consistent and comfortable. For a nonproﬁt fundraiser, the goal of this effort is to entice, retain, and upgrade donors. Effective branding programs are designed to break through the media clutter and ﬁx simple ideas ﬁrmly in the minds of the audiences for whom they’re intended. These programs possess the following characteristics: • They’re based on shrewd and accurate positioning for the brand, that is, they stake out at least one unique beneﬁt. • They are reduced to the simplest ideas boiled down to their emotional core. • They place the most emphasis on beneﬁts to the donor or customer rather than on the features of the product or service. • They employ distinctive themes and images that remain unchanged over a long period of time. • They make effective use of every available communication channel to repeat the same themes and images. 4. Segment your audience for maximum impact. The ultimate goal of integrated fundraising is to build one-to-one relationships with donors. Unfortunately, oneto-one fundraising (talk about buzzwords!) is a long way off. Although Internet technology could enable one-to-one fundraising, few nonproﬁts have put their donor data on-line or can make use of it for tailored offers. The big catalogers like Land’s End are integrating their customer databases; they know what you’ve ordered, when, and for whom, whether you ordered by calling an 800-number, by mailing an order form, or by visiting their Web site. If you log in at their site (they use “cookies” to identify return visitors), they can access all this information in real time to present offers to you. However, only a handful of nonproﬁts have made the investment to put their off-line data on-line. And, in any case, it’s the unusual organization that stores data deep enough to offer donors much more than gift-level options as part of the on-line experience. For us mere mortals working for the vast majority of nonproﬁts, the best that we can hope for these days, with only rare exceptions, is intelligent donor ﬁle segmentation. Effective segmentation requires using varying marketing concepts. For instance, as I noted in Chapter Ten, it’s not often effective to solicit high-dollar donors with the same message sent to the rest of the ﬁle (albeit in a fancier package or exercising more patience on the phone). A donor who contributes $250, $500, or more at a time typically has a different sort of relationship with the cause he’s supporting than does one whose highest gift never tops $30. Similarly, a long-lapsed donor

Mastering the New Media Mix

is likely to feel very differently about a charity than an active one. The messages in direct mail packages, telephone scripts, or e-mail communications all need to reﬂect those differences. The economies of communicating on-line make such use of variable text far easier to do in e-mail or on a Web site than in direct mail. It’s considerably cheaper to refer to the date of a donor’s ﬁrst gift or the cumulative amount of her contributions in an e-mail appeal than in a letter. As the public grows more comfortable contributing money on-line, this advantage could become a major incentive to use on-line communications. When nonproﬁts begin to integrate on-line activity into their donor databases, they will eventually be able to refer to on-line advocacy activity, what pages of a site were viewed, and even what reports were downloaded. Then the promise of oneto-one fundraising will be much closer to reality. 5. Pay greater attention to cost-effectiveness than to cost. As I explained in Chapter One, fundraisers must take into account at least ﬁve factors: (1) efﬁciency (the sheer cost of raising a dollar), (2) growth, (3) donor involvement, (4) visibility, and (5) stability. To some degree, these ﬁve strategic goals are mutually exclusive; emphasizing any one of those four latter goals is likely to reduce efﬁciency, that is, raise the cost of fundraising. This lowered efﬁciency (or, in other words, higher investment) may be desirable in the long-term strategic interest of the organization. Understanding these trade-offs is critical. For example, a big current investment in on-line fundraising probably won’t yield huge dividends in the short run. Strictly from the perspective of (short-term) fundraising efﬁciency, it’s probably more advantageous to spend the same money on major donors, direct mail, or telefundraising. However, it seems equally likely that to do so would be disadvantageous to the organization in the long run, as returns from on-line fundraising efforts continue to climb. 6. Don’t give up on direct mail. Despite all I’ve said about evolving technology, demographic shifts, and changing popular attitudes, most donors still prefer to communicate by mail with the causes and institutions they support. Currently, it’s not prudent to expect substantial returns on-line. It’s unusual for a nonproﬁt to be able to secure telephone numbers for even 75 percent of its donors. And today, only the rare organization has collected current e-mail addresses for even one-third of its donors. Because people must give permission for an organization to use their e-mail addresses, virtually the only way to collect them is to ask donors directly. And even when you have phone numbers or e-mail addresses, you’ll ﬁnd that signiﬁcant numbers of donors decline to be solicited by either medium.

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However, direct mail can be used to help drive trafﬁc to a Web site where donors can learn more, see more, and become more involved with the mission of the organization. This combination of on-line and off-line communication will provide for a deeper experience and a stronger relationship than can be built with periodic direct mail efforts alone. As time goes on, donors may more readily volunteer their e-mail addresses. In any case, it’s essential that fundraisers place a high priority on obtaining them. Eventually, those organizations that doggedly pursue such an effort will be rewarded with the key to harnessing a renewable resource in Internet fundraising. But until that day, sustain and, if possible, expand your use of direct mail. And to get the most out of direct mail, communicate with donors and prospects through all available channels. As the world of commercial advertising and marketing has proven beyond a doubt, there is a multiplier effect in multichannel communications that frequently causes the response to a coordinated campaign to exceed the sum total of responses to uncoordinated efforts through each individual channel. This phenomenon of mutual reinforcement is one of the strongest arguments for integrated fundraising programs. 7. Use the tools of marketing and public relations. Whether or not your organization has a marketing or public relations department, someone within your organization is responsible for the creation of newsletters, annual reports, press releases, and other forms of written communication with the public. Your organization’s Web site address (URL) should be included anyplace the address or phone of the organization is printed. Integrating the URL into all forms of communication, fundraising or otherwise, will help drive trafﬁc to your site. Getting supporters in the habit of using your Web site as an important source of information is essential to the long-term success of an integrated fundraising effort. 8. Set your schedule in advance and stick to it! Success in fundraising results from persistence and timeliness as much as it does from wisdom or creativity. After all, the fundamental law of fundraising is, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get” the gift. However, timing becomes doubly important in an integrated fundraising program. In a large-scale effort involving multiple departments and possibly multiple vendors as well, the demands on management can be huge. Slippage of a week or two in a fundraising appeal in January or February could well result in reducing the total number of fundraising opportunities, and thus the revenue, during the balance of the year. If you accept the premise of integrated fundraising—that fundraising potential is maximized when we make wise, coordinated use of multichannel communications—you’ll ﬁnd it a whole lot easier to cope in an age when scientists and engineers continue to offer up new ways for us to communicate with one another. And you’d better be ready for yet more change. There’s no holding it back.

Mastering the New Media Mix

Technology and the Future of Fundraising To look at the future of direct mail fundraising, it’s useful to review the changes we’ve already witnessed in the ﬁeld over the past twenty years and those that seem most likely in the decade or so ahead. Take a look at Table 14.2, which reﬂects my own and my colleagues’ experience and expectations. If there are unfamiliar words in Table 14.2, don’t fret. The details aren’t important. The true signiﬁcance of the pattern reﬂected here is that, within the limited conﬁnes of the realm of direct mail fundraising, the changes we’ve witnessed in two short decades seem nothing short of revolutionary. What’s more, we have every reason to believe that the pace of change will continue unabated, or even accelerate, in the years ahead. However, it’s all too easy to focus on the changes in the world around us. For many of us, technology can be intoxicating. But in reality, most of these technological changes are superﬁcial, when all is said and done. There is much more that hasn’t changed and isn’t likely to do so in the foreseeable future.

What Won’t Change Today, decades after the eclipse of the one-penny stamp, the fundamentals of our craft remain the same. It seems that daily changes in technology pose new challenges and new possibilities, but, so far at least, they have left the core of our work unchanged. Short of environmental collapse, nuclear war, a virulent global epidemic, or massive dislocations in the world economy, the years ahead promise more of the same. The lion’s share of public interest and charitable funding will continue to come from individuals, not institutions, even if changes in tax laws and the public mood force foundations and corporations to share more of their wealth. The generosity of American donors sets records every year. That trend is likely to continue for years to come. Lengthening lifespan and other demographic patterns are concentrating more and more of our society’s disposable income in the hands of those over the age of ﬁfty, who give most charitable contributions. What won’t change, I believe, are the fundamental realities we have always faced in fundraising: • • • • • •

Most people won’t give you money. But lots of people will give a ﬁrst gift. Fewer people will give you second gifts. Even fewer will give again and again. Eventually, all people will stop giving you money. The need to recruit new donors will never end.

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TABLE 14.2. How the Techniques of Direct Response Fundraising Are Changing. Function

1980

1990

2000

2010

Copywriting and approvals

IBM Selectric, paper, U.S. Postal Service

Word processor, paper, ﬂoppy diskette, Local Area Network (LAN), Federal Express, fax machine

Word processor, CD-ROMs, e-mail and Web

Integrated ofﬁceware, Web conferencing, annotated PDFs, voice-activated word processing?

Design and typesetting

Paste-up, Linotronic

Desktop publishing, diskettes

Desktop publishing, PDF ﬁles, e-mail and Web, scanners

?

Budgeting and projections

VisiCalc

Lotus 1–2–3

Excel

Integrated ofﬁceware?

Targeting

ZIP code

ZIP+4, psychographics, demographics

Data mining

Relationship analysis and targeting?

List selection

Data cards, merge-purge

Database management, merge-purge

Multivariate analysis, data mining, demographic and other overlays

?

Database maintenance

Mainframe computer, magnetic tape

Microcomputer, hard disk drive, LAN

Networked microcomputer, on-line

Distributed processing?

Segmentation

Prospects vs. donors

Recency, frequency, monetary amount (RFM) + source; regression analysis

RFM, source, data mining

?

Printing

Sheet-fed press, web press

In-line web press, laser printer

In-line web press, laser printer, inkjet, variable data printing

Variable data printing, selective binding and inserting?

Personalization

Cheshire label, match-ﬁll, daisywheel printers

Cheshire label, laser printer, inkjet, in-line web press, “signature” machines

Ink-jet, laser printer, in-line web press

Selective binding and inserting?

Lettershop

Cheshire label, multistation inserter

Ink-jet, laser printer, high-speed inserter

Ink-jet, laser printer, in-line web press

On-line?

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Mastering the New Media Mix

TABLE 14.2. How the Techniques of Direct Response Fundraising Are Changing, Cont’d. Function

1980

1990

2000

2010

Communication with prospects and donors

Mail, outbound phone

Mail, outbound, Mail, outbound Mail, inbound phone, and inbound phone, and inbound phone, e-mail, text messagaudio, video e-mail, Web, video ing, Web, video?

Donor involvement

Reply device, front-end premium

Reply device, front-end premium, 800-number

Reply device, front-end premium, Web, pass-through calling campaigns, phone conferencing

Reply device, front-end premium, Web, on-line conferencing?

Caging and cashiering

Manual processing, batch processing

Automated check processing, database management, barcodes, optical scanning

Automated check processing, barcodes, optical scanning, database management, barcode scanning, on-line, Electronic funds transfer

Electronic funds transfer?

Outwardly, what we know today as direct mail fundraising may no longer be recognizable to us within a couple of decades. The mechanisms by which money is transferred from donors to public interest groups may eventually bear little resemblance to current methods, either. But some close analogue of direct mail fundraising will ﬂourish. Today, despite occasional complaints from many donors, despite the clumsiness of our efforts to target and personalize our appeals, direct mail remains the easiest and least intrusive means for people to learn about and respond to the needs of public interest organizations. To play a part in saving lives and making history, donors needn’t suffer through rote appeals delivered on their doorsteps by scruffy canvassers, eat rubber chicken and listen to boring speeches, or view documentaries in damp church basements. Direct mail fundraising is ideal for today’s busy people. It’s ideal, too, for elderly people, whose proportion in the U.S. population is rapidly increasing. Millions of Americans have come to rely upon direct mail as an easy and accessible way to participate in public life—even to vote. Thirty years and more from now—in whatever direction new technology may take it—direct mail fundraising in some form will still be helping nonproﬁt organizations and political committees acquire, resolicit, and cultivate donors in large numbers.

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Revolution in the Mailbox

Direct mail will continue to serve as the ﬂexible tool it is. It will help charities and public interest groups implement strategies of growth, involvement, efﬁciency, stability, or visibility. Direct mail will continue playing a strategic role for the nonproﬁt sector for many decades to come, helping voluntary associations serve the public interest in ever more creative and responsive ways.

••• With that said, it makes sense for us to turn our attention to the external factors that may inﬂuence our lives and our work in the decades ahead. That’s the task we’ll take up in Chapter Fifteen.

15 Twelve Trends for a New Century

S

o, let me guess: you want to know what’s in store for your future, right? Well, if you think you (or I) can predict what’s going to happen ten years down the road in fundraising—or in any other ﬁeld of human endeavor, for that matter—forget it. Our hopes for predicting the future are confounded by the sheer complexity of the systems humankind has developed to govern our affairs and manage this diverse little planet of ours. Our best intentions often go awry; the Law of Unforeseen Consequences has shaped history as surely as any historian’s theory. Discontinuities abound in our universe—sharp shifts in the course of human affairs caused by wars, epidemics, economic reversals, environmental change, and breakthroughs in technology. Besides, we are six billion inescapably human beings—capricious, fallible, and foolish. If that’s not enough to convince you, all you have to do to persuade yourself that predicting the future is literally impossible is to look back a few years at the predictions of some of the best-informed people on the planet. For example, in 1929 the esteemed Yale University economist Irving Fisher made the following prediction about one month before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression in the United States: “Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Come to think of it, didn’t we hear comments like that in the news back in the late 1990s, just months before the bottom fell out of the stock market again? Or you could peer a little further back into American history and see what Charles H. Duell, then the U.S. Commissioner of Patents, said in 1899, on the eve

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of one of the most explosive periods of innovation in world history: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” If those two examples aren’t enough to convince you, check out the science ﬁction tales of the 1950s and 1960s to see what our world’s self-proclaimed visionaries predicted for our lives early in the twenty-ﬁrst century (or even long before). You’ll read about rocket ships in every garage, personal robots performing just about every conceivable function (and I mean every function), silicon brain implants to boost your intelligence, and, well, you get the point. The harsh reality is, experts routinely fail to predict major changes. Even meteorologists can’t predict next week’s weather. If you think you can do better, good luck! Caveats and excuses notwithstanding, however, we have no choice but to look ahead in hopes of anticipating new opportunities and avoiding new roadblocks. That’s the immodest purpose of this chapter—not to predict but to examine today’s trends and attempt to discern some of the forces that will shape our course in the decades ahead. Historic forces are guiding all our lives. We can’t escape them. History doesn’t travel in straight lines. Nor does nature. So the simple, straightforward extrapolation of current realities that appeals so much to our all-too-human simple-mindedness isn’t the wisest course to follow when we attempt to anticipate the future. Still, many of today’s trends will continue to play themselves out in the future. The reality that will result as they mesh and morph and clash with one another is impossible to predict, partly because many current trends conﬂict with one another, and partly because we humans are such annoyingly unpredictable creatures. But it appears highly likely that at least twelve trends visible today will inﬂuence the experience of fundraisers in North America for many years to come. I’ll touch on each of these twelve phenomena in turn.

Growing U.S. Population Not too many years ago, demographers took for granted that the United States would go the way of Europe and Japan. Our birth rate would continue to fall, slowing and perhaps ﬁnally reversing population growth, and saddling society with increasing numbers of the aged and inﬁrm, thus putting an ever-growing burden on a shrinking number of productive working people. Well, guess what? It’s not working out that way. Recent population studies in the United States make it clear that the country’s birth rate is rising again, partly as a result of surging immigration and the higher birth rates that are common among immigrant populations. The upshot is that the American population as a whole is expanding sharply.

Twelve Trends for a New Century

These days, the population of the European Union is estimated at roughly 370 million, the United States at 280 million. By mid-century, however, some demographers now estimate that the United States will be home to some 550 million people, while the European population will have shrunk to fewer than 300 million. Like it or not, the renewed population growth in the United States will have dramatic implications for the nonproﬁt sector, including • A continually growing need for education, health, and other human services • The continuing expansion of the nonproﬁt sector in response to this growing need (unless political trends are sharply reversed and government rises to the challenge) • Growth, more growth, and growth again in the U.S. economy, providing an everexpanding resource base to support society’s growing needs All in all, the future of the U.S. economy and of its nonproﬁt sector may be brighter than you think.

Longer Lives for Young and Old Less than a century ago, when the radical concept of retirement was introduced into American society, it was widely assumed that a retiree would live a mere few years. After all, in 1935 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, life expectancy in the United States was 61.7 years and the retirement age the Act ﬁxed in law was 65. The Social Security system was designed with this demographic reality in mind. In 2000, U.S. life expectancy at birth was 76.9 years. More to the point, for Americans aged 65, life expectancy was 17.9 years. In other words, the average American could reasonably expect to live nearly another 18 years after retirement! Is it any wonder there’s such intense debate today about the future of Social Security? We live in a changed world. (These ﬁgures are from the National Center for Health Statistics of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.) No longer, then, is old age considered to begin at 65. Demographers now speak of the “old old,” those who are 85 years of age or older, and this number has become the true threshold to old age. The United States in 2000 counted some 4.2 million people 85 or older, as well as an estimated 70,000 who were 100 or more (according to a 1999 report by the U.S. Census Bureau). That was nearly double the estimated number (37,000) of centenarians in 1990, which shows how sharply inclined is the trendline.

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Not only are we living longer, we’re healthier and more active, too. The nonstop medical revolution is not just extending our lives, it’s changing our lifestyles as well. Nowadays, the life expectancy of a healthy ﬁve-year-old girl in the United States is approaching one hundred. Triple-digitarians are still the exception—barely 1.1 percent of our population. Not too long from now, they may become commonplace. Think what that means: your daughter or granddaughter—or, with a little more luck, your son or grandson—could well live to witness the twenty-second century. Think, too, about all the living those young people will do between now and then and how much that will cost. In tandem with longer lives, we’ll witness a continuing rise in the demand for health care and education—health care, obviously, because we live longer primarily because of medical science, and education, because “lifelong education” is becoming not just a buzzword among education professionals but will soon be the only route to survival in our dynamic, fast-changing society. This reality has several obvious implications for fundraising. First, when we speak of long-term relationships with donors, we have to recognize that the long term is getting a whole lot longer. One of my clients has several hundred donors who have contributed annual gifts for ﬁfty consecutive years or longer. With a proper devotion to stewardship and a sensitive appreciation of the requirements of relationship fundraising, we can gain life-long friends whose cumulative giving will dwarf our traditional notions of long-term value. On the other side of that coin, however, we must take into account the everrising cost of health care. As our donors age, and the demands on their increasingly slender resources mount year after year, they may ﬁnd it impossible to continue giving generously, no matter how much they want to do so. All the more reason, then, to sustain our relationships with them despite the lack of ongoing support: the potential for legacy giving remains. And ﬁnally, the continuing growth in demand for health care and education spells opportunity for the nonproﬁt sector, given that (at least in the United States) health care and education are by far our two biggest areas of activity outside of religion.

The Emerging Ethnic Majority It’s no surprise to a Californian, a New Yorker, or a Texan that American society is growing more diverse. On both coasts, as well as in the Sunbelt, the proportion of foreign-born residents is mushrooming, and the new immigrant populations, chieﬂy from Latin America and Asia, are bringing with them new habits and assumptions

Twelve Trends for a New Century

about society, new ways of relating to one another, new vitality, and new ideas that enrich life in the United States. However, if you travel widely in the United States, as I do, you know that growing ethnic diversity isn’t limited to the states where immigrants have traditionally settled. In recent years, I’ve encountered large numbers of new Americans in New England, all around the Great Lakes, throughout the Plains states, and everywhere in the South—rural areas as well as urban. Our society is changing faster than most of us realize. I happily welcome this change, because I recognize that the United States, for all our military and economic power, is but one among hundreds of nations, and we Caucasians who still dominate the U.S. population are a tiny minority on a globe that teems with people of color. (The Chinese and Indians alone constitute well over one-third of the world’s population. We Americans—all of us—account for about 5 percent.) However, I recognize, too, that our growing ethnic diversity complicates my job as a fundraiser, and, inevitably, it will make your job harder, too, if it hasn’t already. The habits of philanthropy differ from one culture to another. Having traveled in more than seventy nations and worked with fundraisers in an even greater number of countries, I know that the impulses of philanthropy are universal. There is something deeply seated in the human psyche that, sooner or later in life, moves most of us to do what we can to help those who are less fortunate than we are and to support activities that nurture the mind and the soul and celebrate the human spirit. But we have many different ways of expressing these impulses. It’s clear that the approaches and techniques we’ve honed to inspire philanthropy in the established majority population in the United States don’t necessarily work in communities of color. The philanthropic habits I’ve observed in Asian and Hispanic communities predominantly composed of immigrants, as well as among lower-income African Americans, revolve around family and religion. People help people they know and support the institutions (chieﬂy churches and mosques) that are the centers of their community life. Lack of familiarity with mainstream charities is compounded by distrust of large institutions acquired in the old country (or, in the case of African Americans, the new one). Add the ingredient of limited funds and typically large families, and the chances that established nonproﬁts will be successful in raising funds in these communities are limited. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to conduct successful fundraising in immigrant communities. There is no lack of generosity among Hispanics, Asians, and African Americans. Indeed, some studies show that people in such communities are more generous than the average American in comparison with their income.

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Though traditional fundraising techniques such as direct mail and telemarketing won’t work well in these circumstances, other efforts—tied to family or religious centers—may do very well, indeed. It’s also critical to note that by no means are all Asians or Hispanics newcomers. Some Latino families in California and the Southwest trace their ancestry back to Spanish settlements that were well established before the Mayﬂower crossed the Atlantic. Large numbers of Asians—now third-, fourth-, and ﬁfth-generation Americans—are descended from waves of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos who emigrated to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among millions of Americans who fall into these categories, the melting pot has worked its ways. It would be downright stupid to assume that any individual won’t respond to a charitable appeal simply because he happens to fall into a particular ethnic category.

The Supremacy of the Corporation Just two centuries ago, the corporation was a creature of the state (or, in monarchical societies, the crown). To become incorporated, thus (in most cases) shielding individual investors from liability, a company had to gain the state’s approval for its charter. In theory, only companies that served the public interest could become corporations. In fact, in the United States, it was not until late in the nineteenth century that most corporations could legally operate outside the borders of the states in which they were incorporated. For that change—a sea-change in the potential power of corporations—we can thank the Robber Barons of that era and the power they accumulated over state legislatures and the federal courts. This redeﬁnition of the corporation helped multiply the fortunes of the railroad barons, J. P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller Sr., whose Standard Oil was among the ﬁrst and one of the most spectacular beneﬁciaries of the newly granted freedom to corporations. But it is the latter-day successors to the Robber Barons—the managers of the major national and multinational corporations—that have reaped the greatest beneﬁts. The limited power of the corporation in the nineteenth century is now hard to grasp in the early years of the twenty-ﬁrst. Today, corporations are the dominant force in the world. The biggest multinational companies have greater economic clout than all but a handful of nations. The corporate agenda—social stability over social equity, private ownership of natural resources, free trade, protection for intellectual property, and privatization of state-owned enterprises—holds sway almost everywhere in the world. Corporate interests steer the political process in much of the world, decidedly including the United States.

Twelve Trends for a New Century

There are those (including me) who think this development is unfortunate. Others strenuously disagree. Tempting though it is, I can’t debate the point here. As a fundraiser, I simply recognize that this is the reality in which we operate and that it has many implications for our work, including those that follow.

The Role of Corporations The traditional view of the corporation is that its sole purpose is to earn a return on investors’ dollars. Though this cramped and shortsighted perspective is now widely questioned, it still dominates thinking on both Wall Street and Main Street, and it still plays itself out in an ever more frenzied effort to persuade consumers to buy products and services we don’t necessarily need. As a result, we lucky few who inhabit the prosperous nations of the Global North are treated to increasingly loud media noise—the ﬂash, dazzle, and tempting promise of marketers and advertisers, vying for what they think of as their rightful share of our income, inundating each of us with thousands of promotional messages every day of our lives. In the midst of this cacophony, launching a fundraising campaign has become a daunting task. All but the most modest efforts now require us to use many of the same attention-getting devices as the major marketers.

The Corporate Ethos Today’s corporate ethos is based on the self-righteous assumption that the earth’s resources are humankind’s to plunder. Though more than a century has passed since the closing of the last habitable frontier in the Global North, our corporations act as though the biosphere—land, water, air, and all life on our planet—is limitless. Collectively, the nations of the world, under corporate leadership, are devouring resources at a rate that is so dramatically unsustainable that we will face dangerous shortages within a very few years. Fish stocks in the oceans are dramatically depleted, and many species have been driven to extinction. Our oncemajestic forests are mere shadows of their former selves. The diversity of plant and animal life has been sharply curtailed, and species are dying out at an alarming rate. The very water that is our staff of life is becoming scarce in many regions, with that scarcity widely expected to trigger regional wars as the twenty-ﬁrst century unfolds—a problem that will be greatly exacerbated by continued global warming, which, in turn, will result in droughts in many parts of the world. Everywhere we turn in the biosphere, we can see the destructive impact of humanity’s greed and shortsightedness. So, if you think the environmental movement was powerful in the last four decades of the twentieth century, stick around. It’s difﬁcult for me to

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believe that environmental, conservation, and wildlife organizations won’t soon start attracting much more than the 2.7 percent of charitable donations they received in the United States in 2002 (Giving USA 2003, p. 10).

Corporate Dominance The steady increase in corporate dominance of the political process and corporate overconsumption of natural resources is one of the root causes of growing poverty around the world. The increasing grassroots anger in the Global South about social and economic issues has already begun to increase the demands on North American and European funders. These demands can only grow further if multinational corporations maintain their control of the levers of power.

Shift in Decision-Making Power The concentration of wealth in the hands of a shrinking number of large corporations has steadily moved the seat of decision-making power farther and farther from the communities where we live and work. Many companies that built reputations over decades as pillars of community support have been absorbed by larger ﬁrms. In all too many cases, the civic-minded spirit that animated their leaders has gone out the window along with many of the leaders themselves. It has become more difﬁcult as the years have gone by for local nonproﬁts to secure support from local companies that have become subsidiaries of larger entities—not just ﬁnancial support but support in the form of executives on loan, high-level placements on nonproﬁt boards, in-kind contributions, and community engagement in general. But the implications of this shift in decision-making power reach beyond the nonproﬁt sector itself: the power of our communities is undermined, making local solutions to local problems more difﬁcult to attain.

The Shifting Cultural Context Perhaps Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous Frenchman whose insights about American democracy early in the nineteenth century are still celebrated, has no counterparts in today’s America. I suspect, however, that there are several. And one of them, I believe, is the sociologist Paul Ray. Ray’s studies over the past two decades have led him to posit a new analytical model of American society, cutting across the traditional lines that draw sharp distinctions such as liberal and conservative; rural, urban, and suburban; black, white, Hispanic, and Asian; working class and middle class. After extensive soundings of public sentiment and lifestyles in the closing years of the twentieth

Twelve Trends for a New Century

century, Ray found that about one-quarter of the U.S. adult population—some 50 million people—subscribes to varying degrees to a new postconsumer ethos. He calls this subculture the Cultural Creatives. You can read about Ray’s insightful approach in The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World by Paul H. Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson (2000). Cultural Creatives share a distinctive set of values that contrast with those of the Americans Ray describes as Traditionals or Moderns. The ﬁve most widely cited values, according to Ray’s research (p. 29), are as follows: • • • • •

A desire to rebuild neighborhoods and communities A fear of violence against women and children A liking for what is foreign and exotic A view of nature as sacred A strong commitment to the environment

Cultural Creatives tend to distrust traditional institutions—government, the military, established religion, multinational corporations—and ﬁnd virtue in individuals and local, human-scale organizations that “walk their talk.” They seek to live their lives in accord with their personal values, which include a deeply felt desire for personal (often spiritual) fulﬁllment and a passionate commitment to the notion that the human race shares a common destiny. Cultural Creatives believe that to solve society’s social and environmental problems, we must signiﬁcantly reinvent our business, governmental, and cultural institutions, hence the term Cultural Creatives. Although Modernists and Traditionalists often agree with Cultural Creatives about the problems (including environmental challenges and the growing divide between haves and have-nots), they differ in what the solutions need to be. Modernists believe that the current system is the best there is and just needs some tweaking to address the problems. Traditionalists believe that the problems could be solved if only we could return to how things were ﬁfty years ago. The rise of Cultural Creatives coincides with and reinforces other trends that are more visible to the naked eye: (1) socially responsible investing (SRI) and (2) social responsibility in business.

Socially Responsible Investing Just thirty years ago it was almost unthinkable that any investor, whether individual or institutional, might allocate funds based on any criteria other than risk and return. As of 2001, more than $2 trillion was invested in the United States in a

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socially responsible manner, up from $1.5 trillion ten years earlier, according to the nonproﬁt Social Investment Forum. The precise criteria for SRIs vary greatly from one investor and one fund to another, but they tend to share three important attributes: (1) potential investments are screened to eliminate those that run counter to the investor’s values or those that match the investor’s values; (2) SRI shareholders use their votes as owners to pressure the companies they own to improve their social and environmental practices; and (3) social investors earmark a portion of their portfolios to community investments outside the stock market. Community investments go directly into economically hard-hit communities to create affordable housing, child care, jobs, and new, community-based businesses. (Note that the $2 trillion represents not only SRI assets invested in screened portfolios but assets active in shareholder advocacy and community investing.) When it comes to screening, the most commonly excluded investments are those in tobacco companies, heavily polluting industries, arms manufacturers, and companies that exploit sweatshop labor. But some SRI negative screens are much more ﬁnely honed, ruling out corporations with offensive subsidiaries, a history of labor conﬂict, or a poor record of environmental compliance. Positive screens may identify promising companies such as those engaged in developing new environmental cleanup technology, renewable energy resources, or inner-city enterprises. SRI has joined the mainstream investment community, with America’s bestknown mutual fund companies now offering socially responsible mutual funds to compete with those from the smaller, specialized companies like Pax World Fund (the ﬁrst SRI fund), the Calvert Group, Domini Social Investments, and Trillium Asset Management. Every year, Cultural Creatives pour billions more into these funds, helping to establish a new paradigm on Wall Street.

Social Responsibility in Business Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, social responsibility is fast taking hold, even in some of the most traditional precincts of the business world. In the 1970s and 1980s, pioneering companies such as Ben & Jerry’s, The Body Shop, Tom’s of Maine, Working Assets, and Patagonia were laughed (or sneered) at by their peers in business and derided in newspaper business pages. These companies, committed to the “triple bottom line” of social and environmental returns as well as shareholders’ proﬁts, had set out to prove that valuesdriven businesspeople could “do well by doing good.” In the years that followed, hundreds and then thousands of companies followed suit, fueled by patronage from the fast-growing Cultural Creative population. By the mid-1990s, Big Business started catching on. The new popularity of socially responsible business practices

Twelve Trends for a New Century

followed groundbreaking survey research spotlighting the marketplace value of social responsibility. The 1999 Cone/Roper Cause-Related Marketing Trends Report—the ﬁrst national longitudinal study to identify changes in consumer attitudes toward cause-related marketing—revealed that, when price and quality are equal, 76 percent of U.S. consumers reported that they would be likely to switch to a brand associated with a good cause. This ﬁgure was up ten points since 1993. In addition, 83 percent of Americans have a more positive image of companies supporting a particular cause that they care about. And for companies with cause programs, 87 percent of all employees report having a stronger sense of loyalty to their employer. Companies without cause programs report approximately 67 percent of employees having strong loyalty to their company. Meanwhile, the organization, Business for Social Responsibility, hatched by visionaries in the Social Venture Network in 1992, had begun signing up one after another of the Fortune 500, including many Fortune 50 companies—united in the understanding that consumers were leading a revolution of expectations. No longer was it enough to produce and sell a quality product at the lowest possible price. More and more consumers, led by Cultural Creatives, wanted to know whether you exploited your employees and despoiled the environment in the process. At the same time, socially responsible investors, including some of the largest pension funds in the country, were bringing further pressure to bear on corporate leaders through increasingly visible shareholder resolutions challenging some corporate practices. For example, by 2003 shareholder resolutions on the risks represented by global warming had polled one out of four votes at the annual meetings of some of the world’s most prominent companies, forcing some corporate boards to reexamine their cavalier attitude about the environmental impact of their decisions. Of course, for some major corporations the emerging postconsumer values merely occasion “greenwashing,” that is, making cosmetic changes or simply using new marketing ploys without making substantive changes in their operations. More and more frequently, however, some of the world’s biggest companies are adopting signiﬁcant socially responsible business practices, having concluded that their longterm survival requires them. Meanwhile, inspired by Ben & Jerry’s, The Body Shop, and Patagonia, a whole new generation of “green” businesses with social and environmental missions at their core has emerged and is growing rapidly. Many of these are cataloged annually in Co-Op America’s National Green Pages, 2002 Edition and have grown from a handful of companies two decades ago to a thriving sector encompassing thousands of companies that offer everything on the list of today’s selective consumer. This newly emerging reality has a number of implications for the nonproﬁt sector and for fundraisers in particular. First of all, the Cone/Roper data about the marketplace value of association with good causes have produced an upsurge in

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cause-related marketing. High-proﬁle companies, eager to burnish their brands, have partnered with some of America’s best-known nonproﬁts. The companies provide free advertising, access to customers, and sometimes cash as well, in exchange for public recognition. In dollars and cents, the impact of cause-related marketing has been modest, but the promotional value of these partnerships has proven substantial indeed for some charities. Another implication is that investors’ demands for SRI policies are increasingly being felt in the institutional funds that possess a large share of America’s wealth, including the endowment funds of many large nonproﬁts. As organizations chartered to serve the public interest, not-for-proﬁts are especially vulnerable to these demands and are likely to feel them more and more intensely as the years go by. Third, for decades the nonproﬁt sector has operated under the assumption that the psychic rewards of serving the public interest are sufﬁcient to compensate for low pay and often difﬁcult working conditions. To some degree, this is true, at least in the minds of many nonproﬁt employees, but times are changing. Many young people entering the sector nowadays come with a different set of expectations than did their parents’ generation. It has become increasingly difﬁcult to persuade recent entrants to the nonproﬁt world that their employers can’t offer competitive pay, desirable working conditions, and the satisfaction that comes from serving noble ends. (If you’ve recently tried hiring new entry-level development staff, you may have observed this. I have.) Increasingly, too, today’s more aggressive labor unions are capitalizing on these higher expectations. The trend, then, seems to be toward higher operating costs in the nonproﬁt sector, compounding the challenge we fundraisers face—not just because we must raise a lot more money but because many donors are shocked by the real costs of running an effective nonproﬁt organization today. And ﬁnally, while support from the corporate sector in general appears to be shrinking, there is lively and growing interest among the new wave of “green” businesses to enter into partnerships with nonproﬁts. Most green businesses are rooted in their communities. Some have even been founded with the express purpose of building their communities by providing jobs, offering cause-related marketing opportunities, becoming active as companies in civic and cultural affairs, and sharing their proﬁts with worthy causes.

Implications of Climate Change Don’t be misled by the naysayers in the corporate sector and in the U.S. government. There is near-unanimous agreement in the mainstream scientiﬁc community that global warming is under way, that much of it is caused by human activities, that it has already made itself felt in changing weather patterns and shifting wildlife

Twelve Trends for a New Century

habitats, and that its long-term effects on human civilization will be severe if its growth isn’t reversed. In fact, the most recent estimates by the International Panel on Climate Change make it clear that earlier projections were far too conservative. Under the most likely scenarios, summer temperatures worldwide are estimated to be between 12 and 20 degrees Fahrenheit higher by the end of the century than they are now. Civilization as we know it will not survive such a dramatic change in our environment. More to the point, at this rate of change, the near-term effects of climate change will be far more severe than previously envisioned, and even the modest cutbacks in greenhouse gas emissions set under the Kyoto Protocol (the global treaty negotiated to combat climate change) are insufﬁcient to forestall many of these effects. The implications of this trend for the nonproﬁt sector are substantial.

Health First, the massive environmental changes that now appear all but inevitable will affect our health and well-being. Climate change does not simply mean that our winters will become warmer. In fact, the most recent studies suggest that the greater effects will be observable in summertime. Climate affects wind patterns and ocean currents, which in turn govern cloud formation, rain and snowfall, the boundaries of deserts, and the temperature and density of the polar icecaps. Human life thrives within a narrow range of temperatures; our most vulnerable people—the old and inﬁrm, the sick, the very young—often ﬁnd it especially difﬁcult to adjust to severely high temperatures. Furthermore, as a result of the climate change already in progress, tropical diseases are gradually spreading through the planet’s temperate zones and bringing such threats as malaria and dengue fever to U.S. shores. Over time, these developments will further tax an already overburdened health care system, increasing their demands for funds.

Economic Disruption And climate change is bringing economic disruption in its wake. Crop patterns are already affected in some parts of the world because of shifting atmospheric temperatures and changing rainfall patterns. But the growing impact on agriculture, however severe it may become, pales beside the crushing blow that climate change will wreak on many parts of the world where clean water is already scarce and will become much scarcer. For example, projections show diminishing winter snowfall in California’s mountains, threatening drought so severe that it may not just cripple the state’s abundant agricultural production but parch its cities as well. Meanwhile, climate change is compounding the impact of poor farming and animal

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husbandry practices in other parts of the world, expanding already extensive desert lands into once-fertile territories. To cope with the human impact of these devastating changes will take massive ﬁnancial resources, as well as intensive, long-term efforts by nongovernmental organizations not presently well equipped to deal with disaster on such a scale.

Rising Waters Many of the globe’s biggest cities, containing more than two-thirds of the world’s population, are located in a relatively narrow band of land within a few miles of ocean waters. Most of us, then, are vulnerable to the rise in sea levels, a direct result of global warming that is already in evidence. In the absence of gargantuan public works projects to hold back the rising waters, major cities such as New York could be partially submerged as the twenty-ﬁrst century unfolds. Oceanfront properties the world over face a similar fate. Many island communities will simply be drowned. The slow-moving disasters in store for us are no less threatening than hurricanes or earthquakes, and they will surely place a greater burden on disasterrelief efforts as the years go by.

Shrinking Habitats Biologists are already monitoring a pronounced shift in the growing season of plant life and the habitat range of wildlife in North America and elsewhere in the world. Many species will adapt to these changes. Some will not. The planet’s shrinking biodiversity will shrink further as a result, adding to the urgency of the efforts of conservation and environmental organizations that seek to preserve the wilderness, protect endangered species, safeguard the biological treasures of rainforests, conserve and restore commercial ﬁsheries, and defend our rights to unfettered access to the glories of nature.

Divergence in Communications Some take comfort in the notion—hyped for years by corporate dreamers and their acolytes in the media—that the ever-growing array of communications channels will eventually merge, or converge, into one all-encompassing network. Soon, they say, the telephone, the television, the personal computer, and all their many components and peripheral devices will morph into a single, all-purpose communications device. Humanity everywhere will be bound together by a ubiquitous wireless network that will allow us all to cast off the limitations imposed on us by time and distance.

Twelve Trends for a New Century

Nonsense! Perhaps someday this science fantasy will come to fruition but not in my lifetime, and I expect to live for a good many more years. Reality intrudes in too many ways on this fanciful dream. For starters, only about one billion out of our planet’s current population of six billion could reasonably be described as belonging to the world of telephones and television, let alone personal computers, and the fastwidening income and asset gap between rich and poor nations makes it vanishingly unlikely that this condition will change quickly. Also, as it turns out, the technology itself isn’t cooperating as smoothly as the visionaries had hoped. But, most important, people in even the most technology-dependent societies simply aren’t buying what the dreamers are offering; the world’s telecommunications companies have lost hundreds of billions of dollars through unwise mergers and heedless market ventures in pursuit of this impossible dream. To my mind, our current reality is deﬁned much more accurately by divergence than convergence. For the foreseeable future, we fundraisers—along with everyone else in what is misleadingly called civilized society—will face a proliferating array of communications choices. Our challenge will be to choose the right ones and use them wisely.

Venture Philanthropy and Donor Choice Today’s donors demand increased control over the use of their gifts. We see this trend expressed in many ways, every one of them having signiﬁcant implications for fundraising practices and the evolution of the nonproﬁt sector.

Donor-Advised Funds The most explosive growth among U.S. foundations lies in the nation’s nearly seven hundred community foundations. A very substantial portion of that growth comes from the emergence of donor-advised funds as many donors’ preferred vehicle for philanthropy. The rules that govern the operations of donor-advised funds vary from one foundation to the next. A few restrict their donors’ choices to locally based nonproﬁts or otherwise limit the range of choice. Most, however, operate donoradvised funds along classical lines, allowing anyone who establishes a fund with a minimum amount (often $50,000 or $100,000) to exercise full freedom of choice about which nonproﬁts will receive gifts made from the fund. Another fast-growing phenomenon is the emergence of charitable giving mechanisms offered by some of the nation’s biggest investment companies. In 2002, the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund was ranked number two in the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Philanthropy 400, having raised more than $1 billion the

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previous year. Fidelity was one of four commercial donor-advised funds on the Philanthropy 400 list that year. Many donors are unsatisﬁed with the hands-off role offered them by donoradvised funds. They want to become more directly involved in the affairs of their grantees, as board members, consultants, or even unpaid staff members. Their gifts come with strings attached—sometimes lots of strings.

Venture Philanthropy Other donors—sometimes alone, sometimes in groups—are developing the concept of venture philanthropy. This term can mean either or both of two things: (1) using philanthropic gifts as seed capital to help launch new public interest ventures, or (2) (more often) investing funds in proﬁt-making ventures run by nonproﬁt organizations to diversify their funding base. Either way, venture philanthropy blends capitalism with the nonproﬁt ethic, producing an amalgam that is helping to foster a more entrepreneurial spirit in the independent sector. That’s all to the good, as far as I’m concerned, and I hope it foretells a more venturesome approach and a greater willingness to assume risk in fundraising.

Gift Designation Just as wealthy donors are looking for—and ﬁnding—ways to assert continuing control over their contributions, less-well-heeled donors are demanding more opportunities to designate their gifts. In recent years, the United Way has succumbed to this pressure in many communities, allowing its donors to assign their gifts to speciﬁc charities. Similarly, nonproﬁts themselves are ﬁnding that donors often respond better when offered the opportunity to earmark their gifts for certain projects rather than for general support. For direct response fundraisers, this development poses a challenge, because one of the major virtues of small-donor fundraising is that it normally generates unrestricted gifts. This is yet another adjustment in our traditional practices that we may have to set aside as the years go by. Donors in general reﬂect the prevailing attitudes of a distrustful age and are demanding increased scrutiny of nonproﬁt ﬁnances. No longer is it sufﬁcient to build a strong brand and a reputation for frugality and effectiveness. Nowadays, many donors want to be shown how their gifts are used and how effective charities’ work has been. Fundraisers must be prepared to demonstrate transparency in ﬁnancial matters and to shape our appeals around demonstrations of our organizations’ effectiveness.

Twelve Trends for a New Century

Rising Concern with Privacy For at least the past two decades, public concern about privacy has been rising steadily, fed by widespread publicity about the ways ﬁnancial institutions share information among themselves and with the public, as well as growing awareness of list-usage policies in direct mail, both commercial and not-for-proﬁt. This development has already had substantial impact on fundraising in general and direct response fundraising in particular. As a result, professional telefundraisers have been forced to change the ways they communicate with donors in many states, and direct mail fundraisers have adopted new practices, clarifying how we will or won’t make use of information supplied by donors and offering them the opportunity to “opt out” of list exchange and list rental arrangements. However, we may ﬁnd that further changes are in store for us. First, the privacy movement continues to gather steam. It ﬁnds its most visible expression in the introduction of restrictive legislation at both the federal and state levels and in the rapid increase of registration requirements in states, counties, and municipalities across the country. Everyone seems to be getting into the act, which is testament to the public appeal of the privacy issue. To date, privacy legislation in the United States is still far less rigorous than it is in Germany and many other European countries, but times are changing. So far, the biggest burden imposed on nonproﬁt organizations and on fundraising consultants has been the number of state-level requirements for registration with ofﬁces in the states’ attorneys general or secretaries of state. The paperwork, bonding requirements, and registration fees—a thinly veiled fundraising effort by the states themselves—have created resentment and unnecessary work and have driven some small consulting ﬁrms out of business. (Unfortunately, these requirements have never been demonstrated to deter fraud, the ostensible purpose for which they were enacted.) Until now, Congress, legislatures, and state charities regulators have concerned themselves primarily with fundraising via direct response—by mail and phone, and, more recently, via the Internet—because those programs have been more visible. However, fundraisers using other techniques are also covered. My fear is that growing preoccupation with privacy will eventually lead to restrictions on one of the mainstays of major gift fundraising: donor research. If that occurs, and some of fundraisers’ most favored sources of donor information are declared out of bounds (Securities and Exchange Commission records and property tax rolls, for example), the impact will be felt on direct response fundraisers as well. As our methods become more sophisticated, we are ranging farther and farther aﬁeld in search of information that can help us target donors and prospects more accurately.

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Continuing Globalization Globalization has become one of the buzzwords of our time. In its narrow sense, the phenomenon encompasses free trade in goods, services, intellectual property, and ﬁnancial instruments, which has made its impact felt on the people of every continent and practically every nation. Clearly, though, globalization in the broader sense has been under way for millennia, tracking the development of new technologies in transportation, communications, and the growth of business and industry. (Even in the prehistoric Neolithic Age, trade and population movements from continent to continent were widespread.) It’s that broader view that is relevant to the nonproﬁt sector, because the impact on us comes as much from “internationalization” as it does from the economic consequences of free trade. The implications are several. For example, some U.S. charities discovered fundraising opportunities overseas many years ago. Others have been learning quickly in recent years. The attractiveness of raising money outside the United States ﬁrst became evident to nonproﬁts dedicated to international aid and development, such as CARE, Save the Children, and World Vision. More recently, domestic nonproﬁts such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and Habitat for Humanity have branched out overseas, raising local funds to support their extended operations. Other organizations are likely to follow, barring economic disaster or other historical discontinuities. At the same time, overseas charities have been entering the U.S. market. Many foreign universities and other nonproﬁts are registered as tax-exempt, not-for-proﬁt organizations and maintain ofﬁces in the United States for the express purpose of raising money here to support their operations at home. Other organizations simply mail appeals directly to selected members of the American public. Either way, they intensify what is already ﬁerce competition for philanthropic support in the nonproﬁt sector. The explosive growth of multinational corporations, along with the concomitant trend toward mergers and acquisitions in many spheres of business, has lessened the numbers of home-based corporations with direct ties to their communities. The net effect to date is that corporate support for local charities has declined. In the future, as corporations increasingly recognize the public relations value of local community involvement, that trend may shift. I would like to think that the shrinking of the world as globalization marches on would increase the U.S. public’s interest in international work. Unfortunately, at just the point when the country’s leaders in Washington are aggressively extending their reach across the globe, I’ve seen no signs that public support for international aid and development is rising sharply. The data in Giving USA 2003 [p. 45] show that public support for nonproﬁts engaged in international affairs did, indeed,

Twelve Trends for a New Century

continue its decade-and-a-half-long rise averaging nearly 10 percent per year, but the total still amounted to only 1.9 percent of total funds contributed. Today, some of the most innovative fundraising work anywhere in the world is under way overseas. I’ve taught fundraising to nonproﬁt executives, volunteers, and board members from more than one hundred countries on six continents, and I can tell you from personal experience that the nonproﬁt sector is vibrant and growing virtually everywhere on the globe. And I’ve learned a great deal from the resourceful efforts undertaken to raise funds for nonproﬁt ventures in some of the world’s poorest countries. We North Americans can learn a lot from the experience of our counterparts, not just in the United Kingdom, Australia, and other Englishspeaking countries but on every continent.

The Growing Gap Between Rich and Poor It’s no secret: the gap in income and wealth between the world’s richest nations and the poor countries, collectively called developing nations, has widened in recent decades. Despite high-proﬁle United Nations conferences to highlight the problem and well-publicized international aid and relief efforts by industrialized countries and nongovernmental organizations alike, much of the world’s population remains mired in desperate poverty, with little or no hope for a better future. According to the U.N.’s 2001 Human Development Report, some 1.2 billion people—one out of every ﬁve human beings—live on less than one dollar per day. All told, 2.8 billion people—almost one of every two—live on less than two dollars per day. And the numbers are going up, not down. A trickle of “foreign aid” is overwhelmed by streams of cash coming from the other direction: payments for industrial goods, interest on loans from commercial banks as well as the World Bank, and capital ﬂight to more stable countries. Analysts have sliced and diced U.S. economic and tax data every conceivable way to prove—or disprove—the widening gap in wealth and income between our own poorest and richest citizens. Statistics never lie, but people do. But if the data are unconvincing, the reality is stark. Within the United States, the rich are getting richer and the poor aren’t. After more than two decades of regressive tax policies and cuts in human services, ballooning salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, sports stars, and top entertainers, the number of America’s rich has exploded. There were 2,100,000 high-net-worth individuals in the United States at the end of 2001, according to Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and Merrill Lynch in their 2002 World Wealth Report. (High-net-worth individuals are people with ﬁnancial assets of at least $1 million, excluding real estate.) For the nonproﬁt sector, there are several consequences of these economic trends. First, as poverty grows—even relative poverty in the face of an increasingly

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afﬂuent upper class—its social costs mount, too. Crime. Alienation. Alcohol and drug abuse. All these factors place a special burden on nonproﬁts, which are often alone on the margins of society, struggling to provide human services. Meanwhile, demand for services throughout society rises as the middle class is squeezed. Nonproﬁts increasingly face needs far surpassing their abilities. The burden then shifts to fundraisers, who must attempt as best they can to meet evermore-ambitious budgets. Commentators on philanthropy sometimes speak of “compassion fatigue.” Certainly, as the need for social services grows, and as larger and larger numbers of nonproﬁts turn to new channels to boost their fundraising efforts, donors are besieged by more and more solicitations. Is compassion fatigue under way as I write? Some think so. I believe it’s too early to tell. At the same time, the growth in the ranks of American millionaires has led to a huge increase in the number of philanthropic foundations. Every year, thousands more join the more than 58,000 U.S. foundations listed by the Foundation Center in 2002. Some recent entrants, such as the Gordon E. and Betty I. Moore Foundation and the Omidyar Foundation (based on fortunes built at Intel and eBay, respectively), are multi-billion-dollar enterprises. The money contributed through foundations accounted for nearly one in every eight philanthropic dollars received by U.S. nonproﬁts in 2001, representing a continuing increase in the proportion of funds from foundations.

The Permanence of Change With all that said, there is, however, one more, overarching trend: the seeming permanence of change itself. It’s said that the six billion people now inhabiting planet Earth create more scientiﬁc knowledge in any passing year than all of humankind previously generated in ten thousand years of history. This staggering claim, which is based on estimates about the continuing acceleration of scientiﬁc inquiry, is beyond my comprehension. All I know is that no matter how widely I travel or how much I read, I am ﬂabbergasted by how much less I know each passing year. For unnumbered centuries, humankind slowly evolved in a society that, to all appearances, was static and unchanging. Change came in ﬁts and starts, at widely separated intervals. In fact, during the ﬁrst nine thousand years of human history, the very concept of change was alien to most people. Life proceeded in cycles, marked only by the passage of the years and the progression of the seasons. The notion of change as progress became widely familiar to the human race only within the past ﬁve centuries. How little we know about how our forebears lived, or how radically different our own lives have become! If you were an American teenager in the 1950s, as I

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was, your view of the world was indelibly shaped by the attitudes that prevailed in the Eisenhower era. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy and, later, both his brother and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, the Generation Gap, the War on Poverty, the walk on the moon— these seminal events of the 1960s were profoundly shocking and unsettling. The launching of the Internet and the invention of the microprocessor during those years went largely unremarked, leaving their impact to be noted two or three decades hence. Yet to those who were teenagers in the 1960s, these events were world-shapers, and now they’re memories that color their experience of more recent events. The 1970s saw Watergate, the end of the Vietnam War, the OPEC oil embargo, the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the advent of sharp inﬂation in the U.S. economy. In the 1980s, we witnessed the Reagan tax cuts, the creation of the Macintosh computer, U.S. intervention in Central America, the gogo years on Wall Street, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The 1990s brought the ﬁrst Gulf War, the birth of the World Wide Web, the adoption of the cellular telephone, the Internet boom, and, ﬁnally, the collapse of the U.S. stock market. At whatever point you came of age during those four decades, your views were forever altered by the life-changing events of your time. In looking back on all those years, all that we truly have in common is the inescapability of change. Are you ready for more? You’d better be. Welcome to the twenty-ﬁrst century!

••• Now, to gain some perspective on the road ahead—and on the contents of this book—let’s venture together into a close examination the four-year experience of one direct mail fundraising program. That’s the topic of this book’s ﬁnal chapter, which follows immediately.

PART FOUR

Four Years in the Life of a Successful Direct Mail Program

I

n Chapter Sixteen, the book’s ﬁnal chapter, you’ll get an inside look at the direct mail fundraising program of a remarkable nonproﬁt organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). In the course of four years, UCS reconceived and reinvigorated its dormant direct mail fundraising program, achieving dramatic growth in membership and revenue. In many ways, the UCS program is a textbook example of how to apply the concepts and techniques discussed in this book. The statistics and the sample packages that appear in the pages that follow are reproduced with the kind permission of Howard C. (“Bud”) Ris, president of UCS, and David Whalen, its director of development. The numbers included here are compiled from reports and analyses prepared by Emily Ferman and Marie Minardi of the UCS staff, the good people of the Target Analysis Group of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Mwosi Swenson and Dan Suzio of Mal Warwick & Associates. The managers of this sustained effort were Emily Ferman at UCS and Mwosi Swenson at Mal Warwick & Associates, who share much of the credit for the program’s success. Many other staff members at both my ﬁrm and at UCS contributed as well. Another who deserves special note is Sheila Dennis, who served as UCS’s director of development during the program’s ﬁrst three years.

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16 The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

B

y 1998, Bud Ris knew it was time to take action to resuscitate his organization’s once-lucrative direct mail fundraising program. As the long-time executive director (and later president) of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Ris vividly recalled the heyday of the program a decade and a half earlier, when the organization’s high proﬁle during the Reagan years had allowed it to increase its member and activist ﬁle to more than 100,000. Since then, however, the ﬁle had shrunk by over two-thirds, and the revenue it produced was declining. Though little known outside the environmental and peace movements and the scientiﬁc community, UCS had played a pivotal role for nearly thirty years in many of the nation’s most critical and controversial national security and environmental issues. Merging the power of sound science with citizen activism and the active support of Nobel Prize-winning scientists and other top researchers, UCS had been instrumental in moderating both federal and state policies on a wide range of critical issues. UCS’s long list of achievements recalls some of the benchmark victories in the history of the environmental movement. Here are a few of those achievements. Three-Mile Island. Remember Three Mile Island in 1979? In the wake of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history, UCS provided critical technical leadership to local citizens’ groups pressing for tougher safety standards at nuclear power plants. Two decades later, millions of Americans are safer because the organization’s work led to comprehensive regulatory change throughout the nuclear industry.

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Star Wars. Do you recall the highly charged debate in the 1980s over President Reagan’s “Star Wars” proposal? Evidence brought to light by UCS played a critical role in scaling back this ill-advised and potentially disastrous military adventure. Drive for renewable energy resources. At the beginning of the 1990s, UCS reinvigorated the drive for solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources by providing new analysis, technical support, and training to dozens of local and state environmental groups in the Midwest, New England, and the Far West. Now states all across the country are launching new and creative renewable energy programs. Indeed, wind power is now the fastest-growing energy source in America. During the 1990s, UCS expanded its program to include a number of cuttingedge issues, ranging from climate change to controversies around the application of biotechnology in agriculture. Throughout this period, the organization’s revenue and the scale of its activity grew steadily, thanks in large part to successful efforts to enlist support from foundations and the loyal commitment of donors who had been with the organization since the late seventies and early eighties. UCS became much more visible in the major news media in the 1990s, rising to the point that it was the third most-cited environmental organization in the New York Times during a twelve-month period ending in 2002. And it substantially expanded its activity outside of Washington, focusing on key states and regions where important policy precedents could be set. But despite the lengthening list of the organization’s accomplishments, its base was shrinking, along with the ﬁnancial support through direct mail that had played such a large role in earlier years. In the course of a multiyear organizational planning process, it also became apparent that UCS was in danger of becoming overly dependent on foundation support and that it required a substantially broader base of grassroots activist support for its efforts in advocacy and public education. For these reasons, and because staff resources were limited, UCS resolved to contract with a direct mail consulting ﬁrm. By the happy coincidence of good timing and good chemistry, UCS chose my ﬁrm, Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc. After competitive presentations and discussions, we began work together in February 1999. Here was the challenge we confronted: • Donor acquisition efforts had virtually come to a standstill. The numbers of new donors recruited fell short of the numbers lost to attrition. • Donor resolicitations were mailed to far too many donors, including lapsed donors, and were thus not consistently cost-effective. • Although the organization was going to great lengths to focus its positioning in the media, its positioning in direct mail was unclear, and messaging was inconsistent. Many long-time donors thought of UCS as an arms-control organization, but with the ending of the Cold War that focus no longer made sense.

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The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

During the 1990s, UCS made the transition from arms control to a broader approach to the environment. The mail needed to reﬂect that critical shift. • A disproportionate number of active donors—nearly one-third of the total— had never given any gift of $25 or more. • For an organization with a stellar history and the large numbers of loyal, longtime donors to prove it, UCS possessed a disappointingly small number of highdollar donors. It was clear from the outset that these challenges couldn’t be met overnight. Together, my colleagues and I and the UCS staff resolved to tackle them methodically, one after another, in a concerted, long-term effort to regain the program’s momentum and generate the added revenue the organization needed to expand its many promising programmatic initiatives. In the pages that follow, I’ll describe the progress of our efforts, year by year, over the ensuing four years. First, however, it’s worth gaining perspective on the program as a whole by examining some of the benchmarks we have tracked to monitor our progress.

A Four-Year Overview In Table 16.1, you’ll see a summary of the UCS direct response fundraising program from 1999 through 2002 (with ﬁgures for 1998 included to establish a baseline). A word of caution about these numbers: they include revenue from telefundraising, e-mail and Web fundraising, and other activities managed in-house by UCS, as well as the direct mail results summarized in the following pages. The

TABLE 16.1. Four-Year Summary of UCS Direct Mail Fundraising Results. 1998 Total 12-month donors Total new donors

28,540

1999 30,152

2000 34,322

2001 40,134

2002 45,125

1,247

2,075

6,768

9,287

11,804

$1,610,592

$1,905,101

$2,400,438

$2,754,512

$3,061,984

$56.43

$63.18

$69.94

$68.63

$67.86

263

336

452

542

583

1st year retention rate

38.1%

45.1%

38.1%

45.5%

42.3%

Multiyear retention rate

68.1%

69.5%

70.6%

74.4%

73.5%

Total revenue Revenue per donor Number of $500+ donors

Note: These ﬁgures were based on the UCS ﬁscal year, October 1 through September 30, and exclude all donors who made individual gifts of $5,000 or more.

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ﬁgures cited here, then, do not match those cited next, which are drawn from reports compiled by Mal Warwick & Associates and refer only to direct mail. As you can see at a glance, the numbers delineate a successful direct mail fundraising program, with revenue doubling in four years. But that took a lot of doing, as you’ll learn.

Year 1: Converting to a Membership Program As we—both the consultant and the client—saw things early in 1999, three tasks took on the highest priority: 1. Getting a handle on the organization’s messaging 2. Resuming donor acquisition activities 3. Building a stronger base for long-term loyalty by introducing a membership program with a more efﬁcient, annual renewal system in place of the monthly system then in place Those three tasks absorbed much of our energy in 1999.

Messaging Messaging came ﬁrst. Despite our best efforts, it quickly became clear that UCS’s mission wasn’t singular and unambiguous. Though linked intellectually in myriad ways, the two poles of the organization’s work—national security and the environment—touched different (though overlapping) constituencies and couldn’t be easily conﬂated into a single, appealing catch-phrase. Instead, bowing to the pressures of reality, we settled on a tagline of sorts: “a cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world.” (At the time, UCS was in the early stages of a systematic positioning exercise, but its outcome, including a new logo and tagline, wasn’t expected for nearly a year.) This fence-straddling solution allowed us to encompass both realms of activity, emphasizing the environmental issues that lay at the core of UCS’s work during those years while acknowledging the continuing importance of national security issues to the organization’s leadership.

Acquisition Once the messaging debate had ended, we turned our attention to developing themes that could be tested in acquisition. Three issues fought for consideration, and in the end we elected to test all three. We divided a mailing of approximately 100,000 letters into three segments, in hopes that at least one of the three letters would draw a 1 percent rate of response and thus point the way to a viable direct

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

mail donor acquisition program on a larger scale. (One percent would be substantially higher than recent UCS in-house prospecting efforts, none of which had topped 0.60 percent.) In fact, every one of the three letters drew more than 1 percent. The aggregate rate of response for the mailing as a whole was 1.24 percent, with an average gift of $30 (which was also substantially higher than in recent UCS acquisition mailings). We thus set in motion a second prospect mailing to test the top two packages against each other and to expand the list of lists we could explore. Exhibit 16.1 illustrates one of the three initial test packages we mailed in 1999—one that proved to have great staying power and is still in use today (after necessary revisions).

EXHIBIT 16.1. UCS Direct Mail Membership Acquisition Package.

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EXHIBIT 16.1. UCS Direct Mail Membership Acquisition Package, Cont’d.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

EXHIBIT 16.1. UCS Direct Mail Membership Acquisition Package, Cont’d.

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EXHIBIT 16.1. UCS Direct Mail Membership Acquisition Package, Cont’d.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

EXHIBIT 16.1. UCS Direct Mail Membership Acquisition Package, Cont’d.

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EXHIBIT 16.1. UCS Direct Mail Membership Acquisition Package, Cont’d. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists. Reproduced with permission.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

Membership Meanwhile, we initiated our effort to breathe new life into the donor resolicitation program by designing and launching a ﬁve-effort annual membership renewal series. This sequence of appeals, mailed to all donors at the same time, requested renewed support “for the year 1999.” It was based on the assumption—a correct one, as it turned out—that few long-time donors would object to the characterization of their support as “membership.” The renewal series did its job and more, generating half a million dollars in revenue and renewing nearly ﬁfteen thousand donors. However, a fourth challenge confronted us early in the year because of the tragically untimely death of UCS’s long-time chairman, Henry W. Kendall. Kendall’s loss was a personal tragedy for many on the UCS board and staff and for many of the donors. He had been a part of the organization since its beginnings in 1969 and its chairman for a quarter of a century. A Nobel Laureate in physics (he was the codiscoverer of the quark), Kendall was also an energetic and skillful leader. He had loomed large in every aspect of UCS’s work for two-and-half decades. Naturally, UCS members had to be informed of Kendall’s passing, and Kendall’s many friends in the organization needed an opportunity to memorialize him. The result—after an unusually intensive copywriting process—was the launch of the Henry Kendall Society, allowing members and friends to make gifts of $1,000 or more per year that would enable UCS to fulﬁll Kendall’s vision that sound science could help policymakers create a safer and healthier planet. Table 16.2 sums up the UCS mailing program for the year 1999.

Year 2: Focusing on Member Involvement and Upgrading In 2000, with a successful ﬁrst year—far over projections—behind us, we launched several additional elements in the UCS membership development program. These included lapsed member reactivation, member cultivation, and high-dollar renewals.

Lapsed Member Reactivation In any long-term direct mail fundraising program, lapsed and former donors are likely to dwarf in numbers the active, current donors. UCS was no exception. Our efforts to mine the large ﬁle of lapsed and former members included both a mailing and telemarketing. (The telephone fundraising program was conducted, very ably, by the Share Group, Somerville, Massachusetts.) From the outset, we had known that reactivation of previous members had to ﬁgure as a standard feature of our program. Our second year of collaboration ﬁnally gave us the opportunity and the resources necessary to launch this effort.

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TABLE 16.2. UCS Membership Development Program, 1999. Project

Mailed

Quantity

Revenue

Gifts

Percent

Average

Acquisition 1

06/99

99,179

$36,581

1,228

1.24%

$30

Acquisition 2

09/99

149,924

48,358

1,824

1.22%

27

249,103

84,939

3,052

1.23%

28

2,830

96,315

124

4.38%

777

Subtotal High-Dollar 1

07/99

High-Dollar 2

09/99

Subtotal Renewal Series*

2,472

50,305

143

5.78%

352

5,302

146,620

267

5.04%

549

119,631

560,171

14,948

12.50%

37

Special Appeal 1

09/99

36,902

45,695

1,222

10.14%

37

Special Appeal 2

11/99

10,393

229,471

3,938

10.67%

58

Special Appeal 3

12/99

9,935

50,812

815

7.84%

62

57,230

325,978

5,975

10.07%

55

431,266

$1,117,708

24,242

5.59%

$46

Subtotal Total

*In 1999, the renewal series consisted of ﬁve efforts. All numbers shown reﬂect the aggregate results of the series as a whole.

Member Cultivation In the course of 2000, we mailed four cultivation letters. These included the UCS annual report and a donor survey but no solicitation for funds, although reply envelopes were inserted in the ﬁrst three. Our objective was not to raise net money but merely to inform donors about the work their gifts had helped make possible. In fact, the four mailings, taken together, raised $86,000, considerably more than enough to cover their costs.

High-Dollar Renewal and Upgrading After successfully enlisting several hundred members in the Henry Kendall Society in 1999, we faced the need to renew—and, if possible, upgrade—their support in 2000. This called for an expanded program of high-dollar solicitations. It also allowed us to launch a lower-level high-dollar society—The Friends of UCS— requesting annual gifts of $250 or more. Exhibit 16.2 depicts a high-dollar appeal of the type that we began mailing in 2000. Table 16.3 details the direct mail program during 2000.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

EXHIBIT 16.2. UCS High-Dollar Giving Club Special Appeal.

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EXHIBIT 16.2. UCS High-Dollar Giving Club Special Appeal, Cont’d.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

EXHIBIT 16.2. UCS High-Dollar Giving Club Special Appeal, Cont’d. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists. Reproduced with permission.

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TABLE 16.3. UCS Membership Development Program, 2000. Project

Mailed

Quantity

Revenue

Gifts

Percent

Average

Acquisition 1

02/00

224,955

$77,213

2,769

1.23%

$28

Acquisition 2

04/00

49,976

4,189

122

0.24%

34

Acquisition 3

06/00

295,870

80,178

2,831

0.96%

28

Acquisition 4

10/00

301,929

93,734

3,065

1.02%

31

872,730

255,314

8,787

1.01%

29

0

0

0

Subtotal Annual Report

04/00

3,871

0

Cultivation 1

05/00

3,846

24,131

45

1.17%

536

Cultivation 2

10/00

4,950

16,044

298

6.02%

54

Cultivation 3

11/00

3,654

45,846

46

1.26%

997

Cultivation 4

11/00

39,085

0

0

0

0

55,406

86,021

389

0.75%

221

13.11%

333

Subtotal High-Dollar 1

03/00

2,487

108,695

326

High-Dollar 2

05/00

2,161

77,826

179

8.28%

435

High-Dollar 3

09/00

1,625

60,275

200

12.31%

301

6,273

246,796

705

11.24%

350

159,075

717,731

16,901

10.62%

42

Subtotal Renewal Series* Special Appeal 1

07/00

10,621

31,598

874

8.23%

36

Special Appeal 2

09/00

12,676

32,771

1,187

9.36%

28

Special Appeal 3

11/00

52,410

326,907

4,322

8.25%

76

Special Appeal 4

12/00

15,006

93,630

982

6.54%

95

90,713

484,906

7,365

8.12%

66

1,184,197

$1,790,768

34,147

2.88%

$52

Subtotal Total

*Late in 2000, UCS mailed a postcard offering members an incentive to supply their e-mail addresses. The incentive was the chance to win a gift certiﬁcate for books. Note: In 2000, the renewal series consisted of six efforts plus a lapsed member reactivation mailing. All numbers shown reﬂect the aggregate results of the series as a whole.

Year 3: Beginning Legacy Promotion While our direct mail membership development program was unfolding, UCS steadily expanded its efforts to secure major and legacy gifts. Development staff approached members of the Henry Kendall Society, seeking face-to-face opportunities to discuss larger gifts. And a newly hired planned giving ofﬁcer began reaching out to selected UCS members to promote bequests and other forms of legacy gifts.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

In 2001, in addition to expanded membership acquisition, renewal, special appeal, and high-dollar programs, we launched our ﬁrst legacy promotion mailing. This was a limited effort, targeting just twelve thousand carefully selected members because of budgetary limitations. (UCS staff members continued cultivation mailings on their own.) Though viewed as an investment in cultivating selected members as prospective planned gift donors, the legacy mailing produced $57,000 in revenue, mostly in the form of charitable gift annuities. The major event of the year 2001 was, of course, the series of terrorist attacks that struck the United States on September 11. In an unprecedented outpouring of philanthropic fervor, Americans contributed $2 billion to the relief effort that followed, triggering apocalyptic predictions from far and wide that charities addressing other issues would be grievously hurt. Although this was, in fact, the case with certain organizations based in the New York City and Washington, D.C., areas, as well as with arts organizations in general, these predictions proved to be alarmist. Year-end fundraising efforts for UCS were extremely successful, far outstripping those in 2000. And an acquisition mailing that arrived in mailboxes the week of September 10 was one of the most successful in 2001. In most major respects, however, 2001 was a year much like other years for the UCS membership development program. Exhibit 16.3 shows a year-end mailing of the sort sent in November 2001. Table 16.4 sums up the results for the year 2001.

Year 4: Continuing Growth in Challenging Times Economists later conﬁrmed that the U.S. economy dipped into recession in the fall of 2001, a development that was accelerated by the events of 9/11. By early 2002, the recession was in full bloom, with unemployment rising, retail sales slowing, consumer conﬁdence on the wane, and the stock market tumbling to lows last seen before the Internet bubble. It was inevitable that our membership development program for UCS would reﬂect this reality. In fact, the impact was severe: • By the summer of 2002, the response rate in membership acquisition efforts had dropped signiﬁcantly. It fell further in early fall, recovering to the level of a year earlier only by year-end. • Response to special appeals was also down somewhat, even at year-end. (The inclusion of an invitation to the Partners for the Earth program artiﬁcially makes the special appeal results as a whole appear lower than they were.) • Membership renewal results, while strong, were essentially ﬂat compared with 2001. Happily, these numbers rose again to earlier levels in the opening months of 2003.

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EXHIBIT 16.3. UCS Year-End Appeal.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

EXHIBIT 16.3. UCS Year-End Appeal, Cont’d.

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EXHIBIT 16.3. UCS Year-End Appeal, Cont’d.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

EXHIBIT 16.3. UCS Year-End Appeal, Cont’d. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists. Reproduced with permission.

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TABLE 16.4. UCS Membership Development Program, 2001. Project

Mailed

Quantity

Revenue

Gifts

Percent

Average

Acquisition 1

01/01

300,349

$101,553

3,446

1.15%

$29

Acquisition 2

05/01

296,634

95,863

3,112

1.05%

31

Acquisition 3

08/01

299,972

108,156

3,312

1.10%

33

Acquisition 4

11/01

297,739

102,420

3,397

1.14%

30

1,194,694

407,992

13,267

1.11%

31

Subtotal Annual Report

04/01

4,538

48,100

78

1.72%

617

High-Dollar 1

03/01

2,483

100,230

328

13.21%

306

High-Dollar 2

06/01

1,824

52,455

174

9.54%

301

High-Dollar 3

10/01

Subtotal Renewal Series*

1,392

58,040

210

15.09%

276

5,699

210,725

712

12.49%

295

185,353

842,096

19,311

10.42%

44

Planned Giving

11/01

11,702

57,360

15

0.13%

3,824

Special Appeal 1

05/01

33,728

227,365

4,337

12.86%

52

Special Appeal 2

06/01

8,016

27,161

797

9.94%

34

Special Appeal 3**

08/01

2,969

6,264

244

8.22%

26

Special Appeal 4

11/01

41,580

405,138

5,194

12.49%

78

Special Appeal 5

12/01

Subtotal Total

14,978

100,046

1,058

7.06%

95

101,271

765,974

11,630

11.48%

66

1,503,257

$2,332,247

45,013

2.99%

$52

*In 2001, the renewal series was expanded to eight efforts plus two lapsed member reactivation mailings. All numbers shown reﬂect the aggregate results of the series as a whole. **Special Appeal 3 was an invitation to join the UCS monthly giving program, the Partners for the Earth. The results reported here take into account only the ﬁrst gifts received, not later income from sustainer payments.

Despite the difﬁcult economic environment, we forged ahead in our membership development program, maintaining the volume of prospecting at the previous year’s level, expanding legacy promotion, and bolstering the monthly giving program by mailing both to upgrade existing members and to invite new ones. The workhorse of the UCS program continued to be the membership renewal series. A summary of the year’s results can be seen in Table 16.5. To regain perspective on this picture, take another look at Table 16.1, which appears early in this chapter. Note that, ups and downs along the way notwithstanding, the end result of all this activity after four years was to double annual revenue from membership, increase the number of twelve-month active donors by 58 percent, boost revenue per donor per year by 20 percent, increase the ﬁrst-year

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The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

TABLE 16.5. UCS Membership Development Program, 2002. Project

Mailed

Quantity

Revenue

Gifts

Percent

Average

Acquisition 1

02/02

300,094

$98,564

3,392

1.13%

29

Acquisition 2

05/02

299,972

77,617

2,753

0.92%

28

Acquisition 3

08/02

299,972

74,500

2,385

0.80%

31

Acquisition 4

11/02

296,889

101,353

3,253

1.10%

31

1,196,927

352,034

11,783

0.98%

30

4,985

25,308

74

1.48%

342

Subtotal Annual Report

05/02

High-Dollar*

03/02

Renewal Series**

4,391

232,336

545

12.41%

426

233,276

879,519

20,385

8.74%

43

Planned Giving 1

06/02

11,648

10,788

15

0.13%

719

Planned Giving 2

10/02

12,248

25,929

27

0.22%

960

23,896

36,717

42

0.18%

874

Subtotal Special Appeal 1

04/02

8,500

29,138

728

8.56%

40

Special Appeal 2

07/02

15,649

84,501

1,309

8.36%

65

Special Appeal 3

10/02

27,353

89,102

1,909

6.98%

47

Special Appeal 4

11/02

53,561

337,464

4,638

8.66%

74

Special Appeal 5

12/02

25,000

110,977

1,466

5.86%

76

130,063

651,182

10,050

7.73%

65

2,524

21,072

417

16.52%

51

Subtotal Partners Upgrade***

04/02

Partners Invitation

07/02

Subtotal Total

5,999

2,413

87

1.45%

28

8,523

23,485

504

16.91%

47

1,602,061

$2,200,581

43,383

2.71%

51

*The three high-dollar mailings dropped in 2002 were a three-part renewal series for the Henry W. Kendall Society and the Friends of UCS. **In 2002, the renewal series consisted again of eight efforts plus two lapsed member reactivation mailings. All numbers shown reﬂect the aggregate results of the series as a whole. ***This mailing was designed to upgrade some members of the Partners for the Earth monthly sustainer program and to persuade others to convert from check payments to EFT. The results shown include a projection of all income received during the ﬁrst twelve months from newly upgraded members. The mailing is shown in Exhibit 16.4.

retention rate by 11 percent and the multiyear retention rate by 8 percent, and enlarge the number of $500-and-up donors by 74 percent. So, if anybody ever says to you, “Direct mail is dead,” you know what to say. I can’t guarantee that your direct mail donor development program will work as well as UCS’s. (Of course, it might work even better!) But I can assure you that you will maximize the potential of direct response for your organization by putting into practice the principles laid out in this book.

270

Revolution in the Mailbox

EXHIBIT 16.4. UCS Monthly Giving Program Conversion and Upgrade.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, 1999–2003

EXHIBIT 16.4. UCS Monthly Giving Program Conversion and Upgrade, Cont’d.

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EXHIBIT 16.4. UCS Monthly Giving Program Conversion and Upgrade, Cont’d. Source: Union of Concerned Scientists. Reproduced with permission.

If you need encouragement, keep in mind that about three out of every four Americans contribute money to not-for-proﬁt organizations during any given year. After all, the funds to support the country’s more than one million nonproﬁts has to come from somewhere! And when all is said and done, good direct mail fundraising respects the basic precepts of fundraising: • Presented with opportunities in the right way at the right time, most people respond to appeals for ﬁnancial support for causes and institutions that make a positive contribution to society. • Treated consistently with respect and appreciation for their generosity and concern, most people will give again and again to support their values and beliefs. Follow those principles, and you can’t go wrong in direct mail fundraising.

Resource A Glossary

Account Executive. The individual who manages a client’s direct mail fundraising activities on behalf of a consulting ﬁrm (also known as a Client Consultant) Acquisition Mailing. A mailing to prospects to “acquire” new donors, members, or subscribers (also called Prospect Mailing) Active Donor. A Donor whose last gift to an organization was received within the past twelve months (in some organizations, within thirteen, eighteen, or twentyfour months) Annual Appeal. For organizations with inactive direct mail fundraising programs, the year’s single or principal fundraising appeal, typically mailed at the end or the beginning of the calendar year Ask, or ask amount. Generally, the minimum (or most heavily emphasized) individual gift suggested in a fundraising Package; not the total amount asked of all Donors Attrition. The loss of donors due to death, illness, address changes, changing fortunes, or changing priorities Back-End Premium. A free gift offered in exchange for a donation (generally, a donation above a certain minimum amount) Back-End Services. The part of the direct mail campaign concerned with Caging, Cashiering, tabulating the results, sending Donor Acknowledgments, or fulﬁlling promises made in the mailing, as well as with storing and updating the list of respondents Buckslip. A small slip of paper (31⁄2 × 81⁄2 inches is a common size) that ﬁts into the Package and dramatically illustrates some particular feature of the Offer, such

273

274

Resource A: Glossary

as a free calendar or book (usually promised for gifts above a certain minimum amount) Bulk Mail. Third-class mail, which requires a minimum of two hundred identical pieces per mailing; discount rates available for qualiﬁed nonproﬁts, currently about half of those paid by business mailers Business Reply Envelope (BRE). A self-addressed envelope that guarantees payment of postage on receipt by the organization that prints it (also called Postage-Paid Envelope) Caging. Recording and tallying the raw information from direct mail, telephone fundraising, or other Direct Response campaigns so that the responses may be analyzed and decisions made about future campaigns, including identity of each donor, the date and amount of each gift, and its source (called caging after nineteenth-century post ofﬁce desks, with their multiple cubbyholes or “cages” into which mail was sorted and classiﬁed) Carrier Envelope. The outside envelope that contains the appeal letter and other components of the direct mail Package (also known as an outer or carrier) Cashiering. Processing and depositing contributions mailed in response to a direct mail, Telephone Fundraising effort, or other Direct Response campaign Cheshire Label. A strip of plain paper on which the addressee’s name and address are imprinted by computer; usually printed four across a sheet; named after the machine that addresses, cuts, and glues the labels onto envelopes or Response Devices. Client Consultant, or Account Executive. An employee of a consulting agency who manages a client’s direct mail fundraising activities on the ﬁrm’s behalf Closed-Face Envelope. An envelope that does not have a window (see Window Envelope) Compiled List. A mailing list derived from publicly accessible sources such as directories, telephone books, or city and county records; contrast with Donor List Continuation Mailing. A mailing to larger numbers of prospective donors on lists that have been tested ﬁrst in modest quantities (see Rollout) Control Package. A direct mail acquisition Package that has performed successfully and against which any new acquisition package is tested Copy Platform. A concept on the basis of which a direct mail Package is to be written; usually spells out the Ask, the Offer, the opening lines of the appeal letter, and the envelope Teaser language, if any Copywriting. The creative process involved in conceiving, designing, and writing a fundraising Package; alternatively, the actual wording of the fundraising appeal Database. A List of names, addresses, and other information (in fundraising, especially the giving history) maintained on a computer in such a way that selections may be made or the list ordered on the basis of numerous criteria;

Resource A: Glossary

sometimes combines several lists on the basis of some common factor, such as source, into one merged, master list from which duplicates are eliminated Demographics. The study of statistical data about groups of people, especially such characteristics as age, income, gender, religious afﬁliation, and educational level Direct Response. A form of advertising that elicits a direct action by the recipient of the message; may be a letter, telephone call, newspaper or magazine ad, or radio or television spot; normally asks for response by mail or telephone Donor. An individual who has contributed money to a nonproﬁt organization or political committee Donor Acknowledgment. Acknowledges a Donor’s contribution with a receipt or a thank-you letter or note, possibly with other inserts Donor Acquisition Cost. The difference between the cost of the mailing and the amount it generates in contributions, divided by the number of Donors acquired; expressed as dollars and cents per donor acquired Donor Base. The list of an organization’s contributors Donor Conversion. The process of persuading Donors who have responded to an organization’s Prospect Mailings with an initial gift to become active, regular, or frequent donors to the organization Donor Cultivation. A long-term process through which a nonproﬁt organization or political committee acquaints selected Donors with its work and becomes better acquainted with the donors’ needs and preferences, in hopes of eventually securing large donations Donor File, or donor list. A computer listing, or Database, of the names, addresses, sources, and contribution history of an organization’s donors; sometimes contains additional information, if available Donor Recognition. Any means by which a nonproﬁt organization or political committee publicly acknowledges a Donor’s support, for example, plaques and certiﬁcates, listings in newsletters or annual reports, screen credit in ﬁlms and video presentations, and mention at public events Donor Research. Generally refers to the process of searching through information available to the general public (from such sources as newspapers, magazines, and directories) to unearth facts about an organization’s best speciﬁc, individual prospective Donors of Major Gifts; contrasts with Market Research, which aims at groups of donors rather than individuals Donor Resolicitation. An organization’s letter or phone call requesting additional support from individuals who have previously supported its work (also called Special Appeal or Renewal) Donor Retention. The ability to maintain individuals as active and continuing Donors to an organization; also the process of seeking that end Donor Survey. An in-depth, quantitative study of the beliefs, attitudes, Demographic, and Psychographic characteristics of an organization’s Donors by means

275

276

Resource A: Glossary

of statistically valid survey research techniques applied to a small sample of the Donor Base Dupe Rate. The percentage of names identiﬁed as duplicates or invalid addresses; also known as the Merge Factor 80–20 Rule. The maxim that the top 20 percent of an organization’s Donors contribute approximately 80 percent of its revenue, while the bottom 80 percent of the donors contribute just 20 percent Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT). A method whereby individual Donors may instruct their banks to make automatic monthly or quarterly deductions from their accounts, which are transferred electronically to the accounts of the charitable organizations of their choice Electronic Mail. A computerized system that prints, personalizes, and distributes written fundraising appeals with great speed; usually used for urgent appeals Fiber Optics. A telecommunications medium that transmits digital information in the form of pulses of laser light through minute strands of transparent cable; now coming into wide use across the United States and expected to be the predominant form of transmitting both voice and data over long distances File. A computerized List Flashcount. A periodic statistical report of the results of an individual mailing that summarizes the returns for each list or Keycode by percent response, average contribution, and other measures during a particular period of time, usually no more than a few months Focus Group. A method of qualitative research in which groups of up to twelve Donors or Donor Prospects are methodically interviewed about their attitudes and reactions toward an organization or the materials it produces Format. The size, shape, and color of the envelope, the character of the inserts, and the extent (or lack) of Personalization of a direct mail Package Former Donors. Donors who have not contributed to an organization in two or more years (three or more years, for some organizations) Frequency. The number of times an individual has contributed to an organization, either cumulatively or within a speciﬁc period of time Front-End Premium. An item included in a direct mail Package as an up-front free gift in order to encourage response; typically, membership cards, stickers, decals, stamps, key chains, address labels, letter-openers Fulﬁllment Rate. The percentage of Donors who actually send in checks in response to a Telephone Fundraising campaign or other fundraising effort that elicits Pledges rather than immediate cash gifts Fundraising Ratio. The ratio of cost to revenue, expressed as a percentage; the cost of a dollar raised expressed in dollars and cents; traditionally, used to evaluate the efﬁciency of fundraising programs

Resource A: Glossary

Geodemographics. In fundraising, a method of targeting Prospective Donors based on the demographic characteristics revealed in census data for residents of speciﬁc geographic areas, selected on the basis that their demographic proﬁle closely matches that of an organization’s previous Donors (see Psychographics) Gift Club or Giving Club. An association or category established by a nonproﬁt organization or political committee that is limited to Donors who contribute frequent or generous gifts, often receiving special beneﬁts or Donor Recognition Gift Level. Generally, a measure of an individual Donor’s capacity for future gifts based on the size of past contributions; may include the amount of the highest previous contribution, the total cumulative amount of all gifts received to date, or the amount of the most recent contribution High-Dollar Mailing. Direct mail fundraising Packages speciﬁcally designed to elicit above-average gifts by using larger envelopes, extensive personalization, and a high Ask; mailed to very selective lists House File, or house list. The names and addresses of an organization’s active and recently lapsed Donors, members, supporters, and subscribers Impact Printer. A computer-driven printing mechanism in which metal or plastic characters directly strike the paper; including “daisy-wheel” machines that make a typewriter-like impression and “line printers” that operate at very high speed and leave an often sketchy impression on the page that is commonly associated with computer printers Independent Sector. The term denoting the nonproﬁt world, that is, organizations that are neither governmental nor proﬁt-making businesses; a coalition of nonproﬁt organizations is INDEPENDENT SECTOR; also called Third Sector Ink-Jet Printing. Printing (generally of a name, address, and Keycode) executed by a high-speed printer that produces an image by spraying ink through small jets to imitate typewriter print Inquiries. In fundraising, individuals who have responded to an advertisement or a direct mail package with a request for information or a response to a survey but have not sent contributions Involvement Device. An element in a direct mail Package used to heighten interest in the package and to provide recipients with opportunities to use their hands or to participate in some way to assist the mailer; for example, petitions, surveys, postcards addressed to decision makers, stamps, and stickers Keycode. A code consisting of letters or numbers assigned to a speciﬁc List or segment of a list for the purpose of tracking responses so the list’s effectiveness relative to other lists may be evaluated; usually printed on the mailing label or Response Device (see Source Code) Lapsed Donors. Donors whose last gift arrived at least a year to eighteen months ago but no longer than two to three years ago; sometimes called Lybunts (Last Year But Unfortunately Not This Year)

277

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Resource A: Glossary

Laser Printing. In direct mail fundraising, a Personalized process of reproducing printed material that combines photocopier technology with computerized List Maintenance techniques, permitting each sheet or printed impression to include information unique to one individual on a Donor File Lettershop, or mailhouse. The shop in which the individual components of a mailing are collated, inserted, and packaged for delivery to the post ofﬁce; frequently address and afﬁx postage to the mailing Packages Lifetime Value. Refers to the long-term value of a Donor, member, subscriber, or buyer from an organization’s perspective; calculated by one of several methods; provides guidance when setting investment levels in Acquisition Mailing Lift Letter. A second or supplementary letter included in a fundraising Package to reinforce the message of the main letter or present an argument for a contribution from a different point of view; often signed by a celebrity or other inﬂuential individual List. In direct mail, a Database of names and addresses of individuals who share one or more characteristics, such as membership in or support of a given organization List Broker. An agent who brings together List Owners and mailers (users) to arrange the rental or exchange of mailing Lists (in whole or part); acts on behalf of the List Owner and list user to make all necessary arrangements with the List Manager, who acts as the agent for the list user List Exchange. An exchange of donor, member, or subscriber Lists between two organizations, generally on a name-for-name basis, with the two organizations usually mailing at different times List Maintenance. The ongoing process of updating and correcting a Donor File or other computerized mailing List. List Manager. The organization or individual, often a List Broker or direct mail consultant, who is responsible for the promotion and record keeping necessary for the regular exchange or rental of a mailing list List Owner. The organization or individual that owns rental or exchange rights to a mailing List List Rental. The arrangement through which a List Owner furnishes names to a mailer for one-time use only List Test. A random sampling of a List used to determine the cost-effectiveness of mailing to the entire list; usually based on samples of between 3,000 and 10,000 names Live Stamp. An actual postage stamp afﬁxed by hand or machine, usually either to a Carrier Envelope or to a reply envelope Magnetic Tape. An early but now universally accepted electronic storage medium favored in the direct mail industry to record and reproduce via computer the data on a mailing List

Resource A: Glossary

Mail-Responsiveness. The propensity for an individual to respond to a sales offer or funding appeal sent by mail. Major Gift. A signiﬁcant and out-of-the-ordinary gift, which may be as little as $100 for some organizations or upwards of $1,000,000 for others Market. The intended audience of an appeal; the likely or potential supporters of an organization; the prospect Lists that together comprise an organization’s Universe Market Research. In fundraising, refers to Donor Surveys, Focus Groups, and other methods used to study the beliefs, attitudes, and Demographic and Psychographic characteristics of previous or potential donors, in order to understand how to devise and deliver more effective appeals for support Marketing Concept. The concept on which a fundraising Package is based; a capsule statement of the connection between the Offer, the Market, and the signer of the appeal letter Maxi-Donors. Those Donors who have recently or frequently given generous contributions Membership Renewal. A Resolicitation, used by organizations with formal membership structures, requesting payment of an individual’s annual dues; alternatively, a response to a dues notice or a system to collect dues from the membership as a whole Merge Dupes, or Multi-Donors. Donors, members or subscribers found on more than one Prospect List; in commercial direct mail, called Multi-Buyers Merge Factor. The percentage of names identiﬁed as duplicates or bad addresses (also known as the dupe rate) Merge-Purge. A computer operation that combines two or more mailing Lists in a matching process to produce one File that is relatively free of duplicates and to measure the degree to which the component lists overlap with each other Multi-Buyers. See Multi-Donors Multi-Donors, or Merge Dupes. Donors, members, or subscribers found on more than one Prospect List; in commercial direct mail, called Multi-Buyers Offer. In fundraising, the programmatic action or individual beneﬁts promised by an organization to those who send contributions, dues, or subscription payments; also known as the pitch; commercially, the terms under which a speciﬁc product or service is promoted by a mailer; in fundraising, the set of needs, promises, or assurances that justiﬁes the Ask On-Line Packaging. A production method that integrates printing, Personalization, and bundling for the post ofﬁce into one continuous process on an assembly line Package. A direct mail appeal, its wrapping, and all its contents; commonly consists of a Carrier Envelope, a letter, a Response Device, a Business Reply Envelope; may include other items, such as a brochure, news clipping, or a Front-End Premium

279

280

Resource A: Glossary

Package Test. Testing one direct mail Package (or one of its features or characteristics) against those of another by mailing both to statistically equivalent groups of individuals chosen at random from the same List or lists Personalization. The reproduction of a message on individualized materials that bear the recipient’s name and (often) other unique, personal information; methods include Laser Printing, Ink-Jet Printing, and other computer-driven technologies Planned Giving. Using estate planning methods to formulate and schedule contributions by an individual Donor, generally involving large or long-term gifts or bequests Pledge. In fundraising, a promise made by a Donor or Prospect to contribute money at a later time, with the amount and date when the gift will be made either speciﬁed or unspeciﬁed; used as either noun or verb Pledge Card, or pledge reminder. In Telephone Fundraising, a notice sent to remind those who Pledge to contribute to an organization, with Reply Envelope usually enclosed Pledge Program. A system, often a Gift Club, through which ardent supporters of a nonproﬁt organization or political committee may give regular, generally monthly, donations and often receive special beneﬁts in return; can be implemented through Electronic Funds Transfer (sometimes called Sustainer Program) Postage-Paid Envelope. A self-addressed envelope that guarantees payment of postage on receipt by the organization that prints it; also called Business Reply Envelope) Premium. A product offered or given to a prospective Donor, member, or subscriber as an incentive to respond to a direct mail Package (see Back-End Premium and Front-End Premium) Pressure-Sensitive Labels. Mailing labels, generally afﬁxed by hand, that do not require water; colloquially called peel-off or peel-and-stick labels Prospect. In direct mail fundraising, a prospective new Donor; in Major Gift fundraising, any prospective donor, including an organization’s previous contributors Prospect Mailing. A mailing to prospective new Donors, members, or subscribers to ask for their support; also called Acquisition Mailing or cold mail Psychographics. In fundraising, a method of targeting prospective Donors based on their demonstrated (or predicted) lifestyle choices or behavioral traits (see Geodemographics) Recency. The date (or time period) during which a Donor’s latest contribution was received Resolicitation, or renewal mailing. An organization’s letter or phone call requesting additional support from individuals who have previously supported its work; also called Special Appeal or Donor Resolicitation

Resource A: Glossary

Response, or reply device. A form, generally restating the Offer and bearing the addressee’s name and address and a Keycode, on which the recipient is asked to indicate the size of her gift and sometimes other information as well Rollout. Generally, a mailing to larger quantities of prospective Donors on Lists that have been tested ﬁrst in modest quantities; more precisely, using all available names remaining on one or more pretested lists in a Continuation Mailing Salting or Seeding Lists. A practice employed by List Owners and List Brokers for protection against misuse or theft; insertion of names and addresses, usually ﬁctitious, on the List so that the owner or broker receives copies of all mailings sent to the list Segmentation. The process of subdividing a List into subdivisions or “segments,” usually deﬁned by such variables as Recency, Frequency, or Gift Level Self-Mailer. A direct mail Package that requires no separate Carrier Envelope; usually either a piece of paper with multiple folds or a booklet format Service Bureau. A company that offers Back-End Services, typically including a variety of data processing services Source Code. A Keycode denoting the speciﬁc List or segment of a list from which a Donor’s name and address were originally derived Special Appeal. An appeal for funds from previous Donors or members that is not a Membership Renewal notice; often sent several times per year Split Test. A test of any variable in a mailing (such as Package variations, the Ask, or different postage rates) by splitting one or more Lists or segments into equal numbers of statistically identical names and addresses to determine which approach works better than others; also called an A/B split Sustainer Program. A Gift Club through which ardent supporters of a nonproﬁt organization or political committee may give regular, generally monthly, donations and often receive special beneﬁts or Donor Recognition; can be implemented through EFT; also known as Pledge Program Teaser. A brief message on the Carrier Envelope used to pique the reader’s interest or curiosity and thus increase the likelihood that the envelope will be opened Telephone Fundraising. Sometimes (to the author’s annoyance) called telemarketing; a practice of calling previous Donors or prospective donors by phone to ask for donations Test Mailing. An organization’s initial effort to gauge its potential to mount a costeffective direct mail fundraising program Testing. The process of comparing results for dissimilar items by simultaneously mailing each item to an equal number of statistically identical names; for statistical validity, changing only one variable in any one test, such as different rates of postage, different suggested minimum gift amounts, different Teasers, different-colored envelopes, or the like

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Third Sector. The term denoting the nonproﬁt world, that is, organizations that are neither governmental nor proﬁt-making businesses (also called Independent Sector) Unique Names. Those names and addresses remaining on a merged or combined mailing List for a Prospect Mailing after a Merge-Purge has identiﬁed and eliminated duplicates and invalid addresses Universe. The total number of names and addresses that comprise a mailing List; also the total number of names and addresses judged to be good prospects to support a nonproﬁt organization or political committee Updating. Adding, changing, or deleting information on a Donor List to increase its accuracy Upgrading. The process of inducing previous Donors to increase the Frequency of their gifts Window Envelope. An envelope that reveals the name and address through a diecut hole, or window, with possibly more than one window showing other features of the enclosed material Word Processing. In direct mail, generally refers to Personalization that employs Impact Printers to mimic individually typed letters

Resource B Working with a Direct Mail Consultant

I

admit it: I’m biased. As a direct mail fundraising consultant, both self-interest and experience lead me to believe that you’d probably be well advised to hire a consultant to help you launch and manage your direct mail fundraising program. I’ve made every effort in this book to explain clearly how our business is conducted. Nonetheless, you can see that it’s very complicated and makes lots of demands on your time and managerial expertise. Chances are, you’ll need help— a great deal of it. Too often, I’ve seen direct mail fundraising programs that are managed in-house by nonproﬁt organizations or political campaigns fail to realize their full potential for the following reasons: • Staff was distracted by other priorities. • They lacked the time or resources to meet maildates on a consistent basis, month after month. • The attitudes they conveyed in their mailings were parochial, overly self-serving, or simply uninteresting. • They didn’t have the depth and scope of experience to know how to respond quickly when creative challenges arose. • They just didn’t have the breadth of experience to see opportunities for what they were or to know what to do about them when they surfaced.

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Frequently, these organizations chose to manage their programs in-house, either because they wanted to save money or because they felt they knew better than anyone else how best to present themselves to the world. In most circumstances, neither reason holds water. The savings from in-house management are often illusory. Even if returns on individual mailings are as good as any consultant might obtain, an in-house organization rarely can achieve the consistency and frequency of a mailing schedule managed by outside professionals. A public interest group rarely has the full range of skills and resources necessary to survive in the Darwinian marketplace of public interest fundraising. Public interest marketing demands a lot more than an intimate understanding of your organization and its work. It’s not enough to tell the world what you need. You have to convey your message—cost-effectively—in a way that connects on a visceral level with your constituents and motivates them to act generously and immediately. This calls for a special set of marketing and communications skills that are not common in managers, whether nonproﬁt, political, or otherwise. It also calls for an ability to work with specialized suppliers or vendors: a network of list brokers, printers, lettershops, and other vendors that will enable you to produce your mailings on time and cost-effectively. Moreover, nowadays the difference between success and failure in a mailing can result from very subtle changes in list selection, copy, design, packaging, or other factors. An organization’s competitive advantage in direct mail fundraising lies on the margins—in very small numbers. For example: • Lowering the cost of printing by 2 cents per package could allow you to mail a million donor acquisition letters and recruit 10 or 20 thousand new members instead of mailing 100,000 and generating only 2,000 gifts. A consultant’s clout with printers could make this much difference in the price. • Mailing eight donor resolicitation letters next year instead of six could increase your organization’s net direct mail revenue by 12 to 15 percent. If your staff is stretched thin, a consultant’s attention to the mailing schedule could make the difference. • Enhancements in copy and design derived from experience with many other public interest groups could lift the response rate in each of your donor resolicitations from 5 percent to 8 or 10 percent. When the year’s at an end, you could ﬁnd yourself with an active donor base that is 20 or 30 percent larger. Differences of this magnitude could make or break your strategic plan.

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With all this said, however, some organizations are better off managing their programs in-house. This may be the case for your group under the following circumstances: • If your agency’s annual budget is less than $100,000, you’re unlikely to be able to afford professional help on a continuing basis. • If your constituency or market is too small to permit aggressive donor acquisition by mail, you’re unlikely to gain enough beneﬁt from an ongoing relationship with a consultant. • If you’ve been in the mails for years and your strategy calls for a modest, continuing program along well-established lines that your staff is competent to handle, chances are slim that you’ll need anything more than copywriting, technical assistance, or an occasional bit of advice. • If—on the other end of the spectrum—your direct mail fundraising program is so large and lucrative that you can afford to hire a staff of full-time, top-ﬂight fundraising professionals, you’re probably right to handle the job in-house. With several hundred thousand donors and a budget in excess of $20 million, that might be the case. However, if you’ve gotten that far, you’ve probably long since ﬁgured out that you beneﬁt from hiring not just one but perhaps several outside consultants to provide a steady stream of new ideas and to keep your staff on their toes. Although neither the very biggest nor the smallest organizations may need outside consultants to manage their direct mail fundraising programs, most of the rest probably do. Chances are, that includes you. Here, then, are a few guidelines to follow as you look around in search of a direct mail fundraising ﬁrm that’s right for you.

Selecting the Right Consultant There’s no license required to hang out a shingle as a direct mail fundraising consultant. There’s no test to pass, no certiﬁcation procedure. And you won’t ﬁnd many of us in the Yellow Pages. A national organization has established a code of ethics for the profession and a mechanism to enforce it: the Association of Direct Response Fundraising Counsel (ADRFCO). For a listing of members and other information, contact ADRFCO, 1612 K Street, N.W., Suite 510, Washington, DC 20006–2802; phone (202) 293-9640, fax (202) 887-9699, e-mail: [email protected].

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A great many of the companies that offer direct mail management, creative, or consulting services to public interest organizations are engaged in some other business; they may be printers, computer service bureaus, advertising agencies, list brokers, public relations consultants, or design ﬁrms. By and large, with some very notable exceptions, the quality of service offered by these groups is low. Often it’s “free,” and in some cases that’s exactly what it’s worth. There are also many solo consultants serving one or a few clients, with little or no staff. In a few cases, they’re refugees from the constraints imposed by their earlier jobs at larger ﬁrms and may offer a range of previous experience. Most, however, gained their principal experience in one direct mail fundraising program, typically as staff for a nonproﬁt organization or political campaign or in commercial direct response marketing. These consultants may offer services ranging from copywriting alone, to full-service management and consulting, to data entry. Some are brilliant fundraisers, but skill levels vary widely among the solo consultants. Among the dozens of established consulting ﬁrms, only a handful of which are more than ten years old, the level of skill and breadth of experience also vary. These ﬁrms are often highly specialized geographically, politically, and by issue. Some work exclusively for nonproﬁt or political clients; many pay the bills by taking commercial assignments (for which fees are typically much higher). Some work with a broad range of clients; others emphasize one or a few special markets or issue. Most serve fewer than a dozen organizations at any one time. In most cases, the total staff numbers twenty persons or less. With such a variety of choices, then, how can you select the consultant that’s right for your organization? As you start the process, you’re likely to rely heavily on what you can learn of the ﬁrms’ reputation and experience. Some may clearly be unsuitable because their track record is unimpressive or is based on issues and organizations that seem irrelevant, whereas others may clearly be inadequate to the task of meeting your diverse needs. That will help you narrow the ﬁeld down to a manageable number of three or four prospects. But then the choice is likely to get tougher. You might start by requesting sample mailing packages from each of the ﬁnalists. Then read them. You’ll learn a lot. (If they won’t send samples, you’ll learn something from that, too.) Naturally, you should also ask for references or a client list, or both. If you follow up with phone calls to the consultants’ references, you’ll learn a lot from that. But even after all that, you may still face a difﬁcult choice. Here are the real issues to consider at that point: • Understanding. Do you and the consultant speak the same language? Regardless of whether the ﬁrm has direct experience with the issues your organization

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addresses, do you believe the consulting staff understands what you’re about and the values that motivate your constituents? Will they be able to present your programs in fundraising appeals that are honest, accurate, and effective? • Range of services. Does the consultant have the experience and the resources to do the whole job and do it right? If a ﬁrm doesn’t offer all the services you need, does it have well-established relationships with other vendors who do? • Contract terms. Is the consultant offering you attractive ﬁnancial incentives, such as capital to ﬁnance your program or a guarantee that you’ll make a proﬁt, or offering to accept only a percentage of the returns in compensation? Any or all of these incentive arrangements may be legitimate, but they bear an extra-careful look because they’re also commonly used by crooks. And there are a few of those in the direct mail ﬁeld, as there are in any other. • Creativity. Will the consultant create specially tailored packages for your direct mail fundraising program or apply formulas (and recycle packages) that have proven successful for other organizations? Winning formulas on which successful agencies have been built include such things as sweepstakes offers and extremely inexpensive prospect package formats. There’s no such thing as a “right” or a “wrong” way to look at this question, but it’s important stylistically and it may have ﬁnancial implications. To launch a sweepstakes or use some other tested but controversial formula may be cost-effective, but it may also undermine your support from your board or major funders—or even risk the ire of regulatory authorities. Just be sure you know what you’re getting into. • Decision making. Who will make the key creative and ﬁnancial decisions, you or the consultant? Does the ﬁrm want you to write a check and leave them alone? Or will you be entering into what is effectively a partnership, with the ﬁrm making recommendations and you or your staff making the real decisions at every crucial point along the way? • Accessibility. Just because a ﬁrm is located in your city doesn’t mean you’ll get the attention you deserve. Regardless of geographic location, are you convinced that the consultant will be available to answer your questions and address your concerns in a timely fashion? Will you get service or a runaround? Will your telephone calls be answered? Will you have opportunities for periodic strategy and creative meetings? • Compensation. Aside from the management or consulting fees the ﬁrm will charge you, what other fees will you be paying? Will the consultant mark up printing and other vendor bills, receive all the list rental revenue, or even receive title to your donor or membership list? The proposed fees may look a whole lot lower than they really are. Look at the whole compensation package before you conclude that one ﬁrm is less expensive than another.

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If these considerations don’t do the trick, there’s one more that may decide the question once and for all:

Which of the consultants you’re considering is likely to best understand your strategy and to design—then implement—the most effective direct mail fundraising program to help you reach your goals?

If you ﬁnd the right ﬁrm, you may be squarely on track toward your strategic goals. Now all you have to do is ﬁgure out how to work with the consultant you’ve selected.

Managing a Consultant As a client of a direct mail fundraising ﬁrm, you can exert considerable control in four ways: 1. Creative responsibility. You have to expect—and you should insist on—being involved in the fundamental creative decisions. It’s your responsibility as much as the consultant’s to develop a marketing plan that meets your organization’s longterm strategic needs and to devise marketing concepts for individual mailings that fairly reﬂect the overall strategy. No matter how much you may rely on your consultant for solid advice on both creative and technical matters, you (or a key staff member) must maintain an overview of the program on a continuing basis. 2. Management style. If you’ve hired a ﬁrm to manage your direct mail fundraising program, let them do the job. Ask questions, insist on signing off on all major decisions, but don’t micro-manage their work, as though you don’t need the ﬁrm’s help except to serve as messengers between you and the printshop. You’ve got better things to do than to second-guess their segmentations or argue constantly about type sizes or ink colors. If over an extended period they haven’t produced acceptable results, or you just don’t like the way they represent you to the world, ﬁre them and ﬁnd another ﬁrm. 3. Planning and scheduling. If direct mail is going to work for you, you’ll have to mail again and again on a reliable, consistent schedule. This means you’ll have to resist the perfectionist temptation to rewrite or redesign every appeal or to insist on waiting an extra few weeks before the last trickle of test results conﬁrm a decision to roll out a new package. Occasionally, caution and extra attention to detail are important enough to delay a mailing but not very often. One of the most impor-

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tant things your direct mail consultant can do for you is to help you work out a long-term mailing schedule—and stick to it. If they’re missing maildates right and left, and it’s not your fault, then it’s time to reexamine the relationship. 4. Trust. Your consultant is not the enemy. Although it’s important that ﬁnancial aspects of the relationship be conducted at arm’s length and with all due consideration for what is legal and proper, it’s counterproductive to nit-pick every bill and question every minor departure from the mailing budget. If the company is taking advantage of you or consistently overspending by signiﬁcant amounts, by all means talk to them. It may be time to look for an alternative. As a response to such situations, distrust isn’t a constructive alternative. It can be demoralizing for a consultant to face the third degree about every minor decision, and ultimately you’ll pay the price. The relationship between you and your direct mail consultant is a two-way proposition, and you’re responsible for making the most of it because you’re footing the bill. But in many ways, the burden will be on the company you hire. Not only will your consultant be managing the work they’ve contracted to do for you; they’ll also have to manage their relationship with you.

Managing a Client Whether called a client consultant, account executive, program coordinator, or something else entirely, the person within your consultant’s ﬁrm who is in charge of the overall management of your account should be responsible for the following items, as drawn from the Client Consultants’ job description at Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc.:

Strategic Planning and Analysis • Be familiar with the terms of the client’s contract and with the provisions of any proposal or marketing plan. • Review the long-term direct mail schedule on a monthly basis, updating it at least quarterly, and obtain the client’s approval for each update. • Analyze and review the results of each mailing, with particular attention to testing data, so you’re sure they’re reﬂected in the design of future mailings. • Take the fullest possible advantage of your clients’ donor lists with frequent and varied donor renewal and special appeal programs specially tailored to the client’s program. • Prepare timely statistical reports for the client, and help interpret the data.

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Copywriting and Package Design • Initiate creative meetings or focus groups to determine marketing strategy. • Develop a marketing concept for each mailing, and work with the copywriter and designer to ensure that the concept is properly executed and that the resulting package adequately reﬂects the client’s program as well as budgetary limitations. • Take full advantage of potential marketing opportunities through aggressive package and price testing.

Management and Coordination • Stay in close contact with the client, and discuss plans and program performance as often as needed but at least monthly. • Obtain and keep on ﬁle timely client approvals for budget, copy, art, and donor ﬁle segmentations. • Be aware at all times of the status of production work and list acquisition on every project in order to certify that schedules are being met (or to notify the client in advance if they’re not). • Seek to ensure that the client’s mailing list is properly maintained and managed, that caging, cashiering, and donor acknowledgment services are adequately performed, and that useful and accurate reports to track each mailing are generated and delivered. • Maintain close communication with the telephone fundraising ﬁrm, computer service bureau, or other major program vendor.

Financial Oversight • Draft, monitor, and update the budget for each mailing. • Monitor each client’s payments to head off ﬁnancial problems before they develop.

Overall Marketing and Management • Take advantage of new opportunities for the client, whether they result from changing events reported on the evening news, changing circumstances in clients’ organizations, or changing patterns in the returns from direct mail campaigns. (I tell our Client Consultants that they’re not obligated to come up with brilliant ideas three times a week but that I do expect them to gain enough of a feel for their clients’ work that they can sense when it’s important to talk about making major changes.) • Pay close attention to clients’ mailing programs: identify and avoid major errors or problems, even if that means stopping work on a mailing that might lose the

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client money, delaying a maildate to head off signiﬁcant design or production problems, or testing a new package because the old one isn’t meeting the program’s goals. If you’re lucky enough to ﬁnd a consultant who’ll do all this for you—and if you cooperate fully—you’ll be well on the way to getting the most from your direct mail fundraising program. With skill, patience, adequate investment, and a little luck, you’ll be able to derive full value from your organization’s resources and multiply your impact. By making the right strategic choices and using state-of-the-art direct mail techniques to further your strategic goals, you’ll become part of a revolution that has already started to change the face of American society.

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Resource C Answering the Arguments Against Direct Mail

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irect mail may be wrong for your organization if you or other central ﬁgures such as key board members, staff, or the candidate cannot swallow the unconventional logic on which the whole system is based—a set of principles and mechanisms that prompt some people to think of direct mail as somehow immoral. Here are my answers to some of the most common arguments against the use of direct mail.

Argument 1: “Direct Mail Fundraising Provides Few Beneﬁts” One memorable afternoon early in my direct mail fundraising career, in a walnutpaneled Wall Street board room, I sat at a massive conference table across from a prominent former Cabinet member, engaged in one of the more frustrating conversations of my life to that point. I was visiting him with the founder of a public interest group that the man supported enthusiastically. We hoped he’d agree to become the honorary cochair of an intensive donor acquisition campaign, based on the results of an encouraging initial test mailing. After our lengthy presentation, here’s the gist of what he said: “Let me see if I understand this correctly. You want me to put my name on a letter asking people to send $25 checks to my favorite charity—so you can send out more letters?”

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Some feel this question poses difﬁcult ethical issues for public interest organizations. To address them, let’s review a few of the basic realities of direct mail fundraising. First, a well-planned and creatively executed direct mail fundraising program will ultimately raise a good deal of money for an organization committed to direct mail as one component of a long-term development campaign. At the same time, the direct mail program will give thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of people the opportunity to support a public interest group or charity they might otherwise be unaware of. It’s true that initial returns from a direct mail program will be plowed back into producing and mailing more fundraising letters. Over time, however, the funds reinvested in direct mail will be a small percentage of the money earned by the program, and the rest of the money will be available to pay for the activities the group was set up to accomplish. As the years go by, the initial investment in direct mail may come to seem minuscule by comparison with the dividends it produces. Every fundraising program costs money, and a certain percentage of the returns from every fundraising effort goes to cover its costs, whether it’s a beneﬁt event, a newsletter, a T-shirt, or a direct service. Because a direct mail program may require a large initial investment, continuing reinvestment, and a long-term commitment, it appears that the bulk of the proceeds are simply used to generate more letters. If this were true, no nonproﬁt would continue its direct mail program. Obviously, to be useful, direct mail fundraising must sooner or later raise money to fund the organization’s operations. Furthermore, consider that direct mail donor acquisition is the most costeffective and sometimes the only feasible way for a nonproﬁt to build a broad ﬁnancial base, expand its operations, and ensure its long-term survival.

Argument 2: “Direct Mail Misleads Donors” Some people feel it isn’t right to ask the public to give by mail unless the organization discloses fully how it will spend every penny raised through the mail. As I was told in that board room, “Those $25 checks aren’t going to be used to meet anyone’s human needs. They’re going to pay for more letters! I say it’s immoral unless we tell people that’s what their contributions are going to be used for.” The underlying principle here seems to be that if a fundraising letter asks people to send money to “Save the Whales,” the public has the right to assume that every dollar they send will go directly to that speciﬁc purpose. That’s just silly. No ofﬁce runs without overhead, and virtually no nonproﬁt runs without fundraising. A portion of every dollar raised—in any manner—must go to pay rent, telephone bills, ofﬁce staff, and, yes, even further fundraising. Why should direct mail be sin-

Resource C: Answering the Arguments Against Direct Mail

gled out for scrutiny? A direct mail fundraising program can’t be reduced to a formula. Numbers can be misleading unless you’re looking at the big picture, because the numbers change over time—sometimes very rapidly. Singling out the costs of direct mail also tends to distort its wider effects. A direct mail fundraising program must be seen in context because it contributes in a great many ways to the overall effort. For example, gifts from major donors probably won’t be counted in the proceeds of a direct mail fundraising program, even if the program ﬁrst made them aware of the organization’s work. Thus public disclosure about the direct costs and beneﬁts of the direct mail fundraising program will obscure rather than illuminate the reality. And there are some other important considerations when thinking about public disclosure issues. For example, if costs and beneﬁts are to be spelled out, it should be in the context of the organization’s ﬁnances as a whole, rather than taking the direct mail program out of context. Existing law already provides for ﬁnancial disclosure to the public, since charities’ tax returns are available through the IRS, and in many states their ﬁnancial statements may be obtained through charities’ registration ofﬁces. Public disclosure of fundraising costs and proceeds is a very blunt weapon with which to attack the tiny minority of fraudulent charities and consultants. Invariably, overlapping boards of directors, sweetheart contracts, or demonstrably fraudulent claims in the fundraising programs of these organizations will provide a much easier route to the heart of the matter. Freedom of speech is another applicable principle here. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected on the basis of First Amendment rights the most stringent disclosure and reporting requirements legislated by the states. This freedom, in turn, encourages innovation, which may be the public interest sector’s greatest contribution to American society. With all this said, let me make absolutely clear that I believe direct mail must always tell the truth. No reputable direct mail consulting ﬁrm will work for any organization it feels isn’t delivering on its promises. Ultimately, I’m convinced, donors will respond more generously to the truth than to exaggerated or distorted claims.

Argument 3: “Direct Mail Fundraising Kills Millions of Trees” Now let’s take a look at an entirely different argument used to question the ethics of direct mail fundraising. It crops up in cocktail party conversations from time to time and in donors’ letters to some environmental organizations: “You people are cutting down millions of trees to send out God-knows-how-many letters nobody wants to receive. You should be ashamed of yourselves!”

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I confess I do not feel an overwhelming sense of shame in the face of this argument, but it does warrant a response. Quite apart from the fact that there are much worthier targets of ecological zeal, chieﬂy, lumber companies who devastate the land by clear-cutting forests, for several reasons the argument is off the mark. First, direct mail is used by public interest groups and charities because it’s costeffective, that is, it consumes fewer resources than alternative methods of fundraising and communications. Many nonproﬁt organizations could not exist without large-scale direct mail fundraising programs. Others would need to curtail programs serving millions of Americans. There are just two ways for most organizations to communicate with their supporters: (1) using paper or (2) using electronic means. Television, radio, fax, the telephone, e-mail, and the World Wide Web may all have roles to play in a fundraising or donor communications program, but they’re no substitute for letters. Until we become a paperless society, nonproﬁts will have to go on using the mails to do their jobs. After all, no one’s proposing to abolish the post ofﬁce to save trees. Direct mail fundraising packages account for a very small portion of the paper output of the U.S. economy. According to the U.S. Postal Service, nonproﬁts collectively mailed 990,005 pounds of bulk mail in 2002. (That accounted for less than 10 percent of all bulk mail, and you can be sure it didn’t require cutting down millions of trees to make less than one million pounds of paper.) The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times together have average daily circulation of about two million, as you can see on the Web site maintained by the Northwestern University Media Management Center. The papers’ Sunday circulation is higher, but let’s take two million as a base, to be conservative. If you’ve ever tried hefting one of these papers, you know they weigh a lot—averaging about one pound thirteen ounces each, according to the reference desk of the Berkeley Public Library. Multiply two million by one pound thirteen ounces, or 1.81 pounds, by 52 weeks, and what do you get? One hundred eighty-eight million, two hundred forty thousand pounds. Add another six days per week for each of these newspapers at an average weight of six ounces: another 234,000,000 pounds. The sum of these two numbers is 422,240,000 pounds, or nearly half the total yearly weight of all nonproﬁt direct mail! And that’s just two newspapers—out of the nearly 1,500 that are published. Does this mean I’m suggesting that we should all cancel our newspaper subscriptions? Not at all! I mean to show that (1) direct mail fundraising is not the major environmental factor so many people just assume it is but is in fact a minor factor at best, and (2) paper is still an indispensable medium of communications in our era, like it or not.

Resource C: Answering the Arguments Against Direct Mail

Argument 4: “Direct Mail Is an Invasion of Privacy” I don’t know about you, but I have more friends than I can count who become positively livid at the mere mention of direct mail. (Somehow, we still manage to be friends, but only by avoiding the topic of direct mail.) They profess to believe— well, all right, they believe—that it is improper if not downright immoral that they are forced to receive unsolicited mail. In fairness, their anger usually encompasses catalog merchants and credit card purveyors as well as fundraisers, but to them it’s all “junk mail.” It puzzles me that any reasonably intelligent grown-up could become unhinged over this issue. After all, this “problem” can be quickly and easily solved by recycling unwanted mail or (heaven forbid!) depositing it in the trash, which is precisely what happens to so much of it. So why the fury? Privacy is precious, of course, and most Americans view it as a constitutional right. But shouldn’t we all reserve our anger for those who genuinely invade our privacy? For example, most of America’s ﬁnancial institutions thrive on the basis of intimate personal information about all of us that’s freely traded in the marketplace. Identity theft is becoming a concern for more and more Americans, precisely because so much sensitive personal information is so readily available through public channels, chieﬂy over the Internet. Granted, this sort of thing is generally well hidden from us, and a piece of mail in a mailbox is a tangible thing that is hard to overlook. But does that seem to be an appropriate object of anger? Unfortunately, this is an emotional matter. Logic has nothing to do with it, so there is no way I can refute the argument using only words. A little TLC seems to be called for.

••• I hope I’ve successfully refuted the arguments against direct mail and given you the ammunition you need when one of these misconceptions crops up in conversation. But you be the judge!

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Resource D Fundraising Ratios and Other Deceptions

C

onventional wisdom holds that the best way to measure your organization’s efﬁciency is to look at the percentage of your income spent on overhead and fundraising. The popular press, the charitable “watchdog” agencies, and our own ingrown instincts all tell us this is the right way to determine whether you’re doing a good job of running your nonproﬁt organization. As the argument goes, if you spend more than 10 or 20 cents to raise a dollar—a “fundraising ratio” of 10 to 20 percent—then there must be something wrong with you. Well, that’s bunk. The fundraising ratio is a meaningful measurement for America’s biggest charities: the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, UNICEF, Goodwill Industries, CARE, the American Cancer Society. All these groups are decades-old, command instant name recognition, and have large development departments with the talent and the resources to use every conceivable means to raise money and can make the most of every dollar spent on fundraising. Each of them raises more than $300 million per year. But applying the same simplistic criteria to young public interest groups or charities with budgets a hundredth or a thousandth the size usually makes no sense at all. In exceptional cases where fraud or ﬂagrant mismanagement is suspected, an extremely high fundraising ratio may be an early warning signal. An organization that’s spending 95 cents to raise every dollar after three or four years of extensive direct mail promotion is clearly not worthy of donors’ support. A closer look may

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reveal that the organization is promising a miraculous cancer cure and working out of a third-ﬂoor walkup and a post ofﬁce box, and that the organization’s founder and $200,000-a-year executive director is the brother-in-law and former employee of its direct mail consultant. But even though fraudulent charities have existed since a charitable impulse moved some far-sighted noble to give away the ﬁrst shekel, they are uncommon today. It’s a tragic mistake to hobble thousands of sincere and effective public interest organizations with rules designed to inhibit a few bad actors. Moreover, where fraud is likely, an unusually high fundraising ratio is probably just one of many grave and obvious problems. If charitable donors were to limit their gifts to the handful of the nation’s more than one million nonproﬁt tax-exempt organizations that meet these conventional criteria for nonproﬁt performance, charities would be few and far between. Groups springing up to meet new needs or simply to keep the old agencies honest would die as quickly as they were born. That’s because only an organization with a truly secure funding base can fulﬁll these extravagant regulatory fantasies. When a few phone calls and a lunch meeting with a wealthy donor can produce a multi-million-dollar gift or bequest, fundraising costs are minimal when expressed as a percentage of the proceeds. Much the same goes for an organization with a large, loyal following of donors who can be counted on to renew their support year after year. In either case, the fundraising ratio is likely to be low. But a small, less well-established group or one just starting out to address a newly emerging need is not likely to be in a position to achieve the same results with such little effort. It may take several years of repeat giving and continuous cultivation before you can count on getting gifts from a donor. Fundraising is hard work and for most nonproﬁts expensive, especially at the beginning. Partly because many so-called authorities keep beating the drum for the most restrictive deﬁnitions of acceptable fundraising practices, relatively few donors will give more than token sums to any but the best-established, blue-ribbon charities. To smaller and newer organizations, gifts are typically much less generous. And obtaining them can take a great deal of time and money. People tend not to trust what they don’t know. To show the contrast, let’s look at two hypothetical nonproﬁt organizations:

Charity A Founded thirty years ago, Charity A has an annual budget of $12 million, which it obtains in the following manner: Trustees and major donors Bequests and planned giving programs Income from endowment (established 15 years ago)

$4,000,000 $2,000,000 $2,000,000

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Foundation and corporate support Direct mail and telephone fundraising (from 30,000 donors) Sale and licensing of products and services Total Income Budget

$2,000,000 $1,000,000 $1,000,000 $12,000,000

Organization B Founded three years ago, Organization B has a $2 million budget, which it meets as follows: Foundation support Direct mail and telephone fundraising (from 20,000 donors) Trustees and major donors Sale of products and services Total Income Budget

$900,000 $600,000 $400,000 $100,000 $2,000,000

It’s entirely possible that Charity A and Organization B could each be spending $1 million per year on fundraising and overhead. For Charity A, this represents one-twelfth of its budget, or 8 cents on the dollar. For Organization B, $1 million is half its revenue, or 50 cents on the dollar—more than six times as high a fundraising cost as that of Charity A. Does that make Charity A six times “better” than Organization B? Not on your life! Leave aside for the moment the possibility that the $11 million that Charity A has left over to spend directly on its programs might just be going down the drain on misguided or irrelevant projects, getting socked away in fatter and fatter “reserve” funds, or even keeping a passel of unimaginative people at work in featherbedding jobs. After all, Organization B could just as easily have misbegotten priorities or incompetent staff. Let’s just look a little closer at the income side of the ledger. The contrast is dramatic: • Organization B’s work with major donors is just beginning. It’s had few opportunities to identify or cultivate major donors or to establish a program of planned giving and bequests, much less an endowment fund. These are Charity A’s principal sources of ﬁnancial support, but they took years to develop. • Nearly half of Organization B’s $2 million budget is contributed by foundations. For Charity A, which receives grants worth more than twice as much, foundation and corporate support is only one-sixth of its total funding. Most foundations—and particularly corporate philanthropies, which may have stockholders to worry about—favor name-brand charities. Money attracts money.

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• With its name less well established and its merchandising program in its infancy, Organization B’s income from the licensing and sale of products is only a tenth as great as Charity A’s. Name recognition usually takes time to establish, and familiarity sells products as well as programs. The real measure of a nonproﬁt organization’s effectiveness is the cost of the results it gains. By that yardstick, many nonproﬁts with enviable fundraising ratios are singularly ineffective when compared to some of the scrappy, innovative, grassroots organizations with which I’m familiar—ventures that rarely are able to raise a dollar for less than 35 or 40 cents. Another big contrast between Charity A and Organization B lies in their direct mail and telephone fundraising programs: • For Charity A, raising money from 30,000 direct mail donors, a great many of them of long standing, is a very proﬁtable proposition. To replace those ﬁve or six thousand lost by attrition each year requires little new investment in donor acquisition. The full cost of Charity A’s direct mail program may be no more than $250,000. An overall revenue-to-cost ratio of four- or even six-to-one is not at all unlikely in a mature program of this sort. • Organization B’s fast-growth direct mail strategy looks a lot different. In its second year of aggressive donor acquisition, Organization B might even be spending on direct mail more than the $600,000 it’s raising. • Charity A’s direct mail program obviously emphasizes the cultivation and resolicitation of loyal, long-term donors. For Organization B, direct mail and telemarketing are tools to meet a different and more costly challenge: to identify and recruit new donors. How does Organization B get to be like Charity A? By doing precisely what it’s now doing, that is, methodically building and cultivating its donor base year after year after year. As you can see clearly in this example, direct mail is only one of a great many fundraising tools that charities and public interest organizations can employ in the service of their strategies to make the world a better place. In fact, for all but a handful of nonproﬁts and political campaigns, a large-scale direct mail program makes little sense in the absence of other fundraising efforts, especially on the high end of the donor scale. For example, Organization B’s expensive, fast-growth strategy will really start paying off only when its development program includes major gift opportunities such as Charity A’s. Nonproﬁt organizations spring into existence to ﬁll unmet needs, to challenge old concepts, and to espouse new ideas. It’s no accident that many nonproﬁts have such a tough time raising funds; what they advocate is downright unpopular.

Resource D: Fundraising Ratios and Other Deceptions

But even organizations that meet universally acknowledged needs and altogether avoid controversy are likely to face an uphill battle getting their fundraising programs up to a level of efﬁciency that allows for a consistently low fundraising ratio and still provides for necessary growth. To do so takes time. After people, issues, and money, time is the fourth dimension of fundraising. It’s often unseen and rarely appreciated. But no fundraising program may be fairly evaluated without a full understanding of this most precious of commodities. I hope that the central role of time in direct mail fundraising has become clear in the pages of this book.

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Resource E Direct Mail Fundraising in the Thirteenth Century?

I

f you think Richard Viguerie, Jerry Huntsinger, Roger Craver, or any other living human being invented direct mail fundraising, guess again. I knew it came into existence a lot earlier than World War II. I just didn’t know how much earlier. Now I believe I know. Friends and colleagues competed to pass along to me the world’s ﬁrst example of a direct mail fundraising letter. I thought I’d hit the jackpot last year when writer Adam Hochschild presented me with a photocopy from the “Minute Books of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade”—minutes of the meeting of October 7, 1788. The handwritten letter reproduced in those minutes reads in full as follows: Sir, The Funds of the Society instituted for the abolition of the Slave Trade being nearly exhausted, the Committee being of the opinion that the prosecution of the business will require a Sum equal to if not exceeding the amount of the Subscriptions already received in order to defray the necessary expenses of the Parties who are disposed to give their evidence before the House of Commons feel it incumbent upon them again to make application to the liberality of the Public & have directed their

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Resource E: Direct Mail Fundraising in the Thirteenth Century?

Secretary Mr. John Frederick Garling to solicit on their behalf the renewal of your Subscription to facilitate the completion of an object so important to the Interests of Humanity. By Order of the Committee, Granville Sharp, Chairman In its formality, the 114-word single sentence of that solicitation has a distinctly quaint character. Imagine my surprise, then, to receive a much older but far more contemporary-sounding direct mail appeal, sent to me by San Francisco Bay Area fundraising consultant Lisa Hoffman. Lisa works with the San Francisco Zen Center, and there she encountered a translation of an appeal sent to Buddhist monks throughout Japan in 1235 by Eihei Dogen, monk of the Kannondori Monastery. (The letter was translated by Michael Wenger and Kazuaki Tanahashi.) The letter begins: We respectfully make this announcement to all buddhas in the ten directions, sages and monks in the heavenly and human worlds, the eight types of beings in the dragon realm, generous men and women. We wish to construct a training hall with small donations from people’s pure heart. Now, how’s that for targeting the audience? “Eight types of beings in the dragon realm” as well as “generous men and women”? The letter continues after two paragraphs of references to Buddhist duty: For some years ever since I returned to Japan from China, I have vowed to establish a monastery. But there has not been a place suitable to support monks’ formal practice using bowls and robes. Now we have acquired an excellent place. . . . Although it is still covered with weeds and not yet functioning, we plan to build a training monastery there . . . We urgently need a Monks’ Hall right now. We plan to build one seven ken square [70-feet-square], with no interior walls. We will set up long platforms to reside on, where we will practice day and night without fail . . . It’s difﬁcult to ﬁnd a better example in contemporary fundraising letters of a speciﬁc justiﬁcation for the need for money. And did you notice the urgent note in the copy?

Resource E: Direct Mail Fundraising in the Thirteenth Century?

The letter continues by noting the great impact the new monastery can have on the practice of Buddhism and how it represents the latest expression of a centuriesold tradition, then offers this note about donor recognition: We will acknowledge gifts by installing the donors’ names in the center of the sacred image. The myriad syllables of the seed wisdom will honor the donors and everyone. The monk’s letter closes on a lyrical note, waxing poetic about the celestial scope of the project: Those who attain the way in this hall will be guiding masters of the assembly. Truly they will be knowledgeable and reach not only the human realm but transform beings in the heavenly realm and in the dragons’ palace. Those in the realms of magic and darkness will also listen. Thus this dharma wheel transmitted from Shyakyamuni Buddha can reach everywhere. How could you possibly resist such a compelling appeal?

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Resource F Reading List and On-Line Resources

T

he following is a list of twenty-nine books about direct mail fundraising, fundraising in general, and direct marketing. I’ve found them all to be helpful in understanding and applying the principles of fundraising and their application to direct response. I am immodestly including several of my own books.

The Twenty-Nine Most Useful Books 1. Burk, P. Thanks! A Guide to Donor-Centred Fundraising. Toronto: Burk & Associates, Ltd., 2000. Based on intensive market research in Canada, this book is a sharp slap in the face to any fundraiser who believes it’s possible to dispense with donor acknowledgments. 2. Burk, P. Donor-Centered Fundraising: How to Hold On to Your Donors and Raise Much More Money. Toronto: Burk & Associates, Ltd., 2003. This book, like its predecessor, is based on intensive donor research, but this time in the United States. 3. Burnett, K. Relationship Fundraising. (2nd ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. This classic, recently revised and updated by the dean of direct mail fundraising in Europe and the United Kingdom, compellingly states the case

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for relationship fundraising and sets the tone for truly successful long-term donor development programs. 4. Burnett, K. Friends for Life. London: The White Lion Press Limited, 1996. This sequel to Burnett’s original book includes illuminating case studies. 5. The Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University, Giving USA 2003: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2002. Indianapolis: AAFRC Trust for Philanthropy, 2003. 6. Flanagan, J. Successful Fundraising. (2nd ed.) Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2000. This is simply the best and most comprehensive treatment of fundraising for community organizations; probably the best-selling fundraising book of all time. 7. Grace, K. Beyond Fund Raising: New Strategies for Nonproﬁt Innovation and Investment. New York: Wiley, 1997. This book addresses the need for the nonproﬁt sector to go beyond fundraising and understand and apply development principles. 8. Huntsinger, J. Eighty-Six Tutorials on Creating Fundraising Letters and Packages. Ashland, Va.: Emerson Publishers, 2000. Huntsinger has holed up on his farm in Virginia to make money by (what else?) writing fundraising letters, but his sagacity about writing for response lives on in this three-inch-thick workbook chock full of examples. 9. Johnston, M. Direct Response Fund Raising: Mastering New Trends for Results. New York: Wiley, 2000. This is a handy guide to contemporary thinking about new techniques in direct response fundraising. 10. Kuniholm, R. The Complete Book of Model Fund-Raising Letters. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1995. Of a shelf full of books that feature sample and model fundraising letters, this is the best I’ve seen. 11. Lautman, K., and Goldstein, H. Dear Friend: Mastering the Art of Direct Mail Fund Raising. (2nd ed.) Washington, D.C.: The Taft Group, 1990. This introductory book on direct mail is very well done; emphasizes the technical side of the craft rather than the strategic. 12. McKinnon, H. Hidden Gold: How Monthly Giving Will Build Donor Loyalty, Boost Your Organization’s Income, and Increase Financial Stability. Chicago: Bonus Books, 1999. Written by one of the world’s leading practitioners of monthly giving programs, this book lays it all out, from soup to nuts; edited by yours truly.

Resource F: Reading List and On-Line Resources

13. Nash, E. Direct Marketing. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. The industry’s “how-to” classic has been completely updated with new chapters on the Internet and global marketing. 14. Ogilvy, D. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Crown Publishers, 1983. This is one of several extraordinary books by the late, great David Ogilvy, who was in many ways the godfather of direct mail fundraising for his lifelong emphasis on long, information-packed copy. 15. Panas, J. MegaGifts. Chicago: Pluribus Press, 1984. This is one of a slew of beautifully written books by one of the most proliﬁc and perceptive writers in the ﬁeld of fundraising. 16. Rich, P., and Hines, D. Membership Development. Gaithersburg, Md.: Aspen Publishers, 2002. This is a comprehensive discussion of all aspects of building a successful membership development program. 17. Robinson, E.M.M. The Nonproﬁt Membership Toolkit. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2003. Here is a comprehensive treatment of membership development techniques as used by small and medium-sized nonproﬁt organizations in the United States. 18. Stern, G. J. Marketing Workbook for Nonproﬁt Organizations. St. Paul, Minn.: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation Publishing Center, 1990. This book is a wonderful resource to assist the nonproﬁt sector in the marketing planning process. 19. Stern, G. J. Marketing Workbook for Nonproﬁt Organizations Volume II: Mobilize People for Marketing Success. St. Paul, Minn.: Amherst H. Wilder Foundation Publishing Center, 1997. This sequel to Stern’s popular Marketing Workbook includes complete instructions, examples, and detailed worksheets to help mobilize nonproﬁt organizations toward focused promotion campaigns. 20. Stone, R., and Jacobs, R. Successful Direct Marketing Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Regarded as the bible of direct marketing by generations of marketers, this is a thoroughgoing approach to the principles of the craft. 21. Tempel, E. (ed.). Hank Rosso’s Achieving Excellence in Fund Raising. (2nd ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. A fresh take on what the late Hank Rosso called “the gentle art” of fundraising, this compendium of tightly edited articles on all major aspects of fundraising is edited by the director of the nation’s preeminent academic center on philanthropy.

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22. Trenbeth, R. The Membership Mystique. Rockville, Md: The Fund-Raising Institute, 1986. This classic, ﬁrst book on membership development by the late Dick Trenbeth is long out of print but still well worth reading, if you can ﬁnd a copy in a library. 23. Vögele, S. Handbook of Direct Mail. Cambridge: University Press, 1992. The good Herr Doktor wrote this book in German, and it shows in the clumsy English translation, but the wisdom embedded in these pages is worth the digging and the puzzlement; Vögele’s “Dialogue Method” forms the basis of much of the practice of successful contemporary direct mail fundraisers. 24. Warwick, M. The Five Strategies for Fundraising Success. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2000. Based on the strategic concept introduced in Chapter One of this book, this is the only effort I’ve encountered in print to devise a theoretical construct to analyze the role of fundraising in nonproﬁt development. 25. Warwick, M. How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters. San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2001. Several others have written how-to books on this topic, but no others are currently in print. I can recommend this one to you. 26. Warwick, M. Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. This is the only book now in print on the subject of testing for direct mail fundraising; includes actual detailed results from more than three hundred tests. 27. Warwick, M., Hart, T., and Allen, N. (eds.). Fundraising on the Internet. (2nd ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. Appearing in 1995, the ﬁrst edition of this book was the ﬁrst ever to be published on the subject (just three years after the public debut of the World Wide Web); rather than a true second edition this is a completely new treatment of the topic and remains the only attempt to cover it in a comprehensive way. 28. Warwick, M., and Hitchcock, S. Ten Steps to Fundraising Success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. Here’s a workbook that includes dozens of checklists and worksheets that may be used to implement a strategic planning process based on the theory developed in Five Strategies. 29. Wunderman, L. Being Direct: Making Advertising Pay. New York: Random House, 1996. Wunderman, known as the pioneering father of direct marketing, tells his own story of how his visionary marketing techniques transformed the advertising industry and will shape the interactive marketplace of the future; a good read and full of insight.

Resource F: Reading List and On-Line Resources

The Eleven Most Useful Periodicals Among the many periodicals published for fundraisers, nonproﬁt executives, and direct marketers, these eleven have proven themselves consistently the most helpful in my work in direct mail fundraising for public interest organizations. I’m including my own newsletter because it is the only one devoted exclusively to direct response fundraising. 1. The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 1255 Twenty-Third Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20037. Biweekly except for the ﬁrst two weeks in July and the last two weeks in December, $69.50 annual subscription; the single best source of current news and opinion about fundraising and the nonproﬁt sector. 2. Contributions, P.O. Box 338, Medﬁeld, MA 02052, www.contributions magazine.com. 6 issues per year, $40 annual subscription; includes a regular column on direct mail by my colleague, Steve Hitchcock; informative tabloidstyle magazine and a good source of information about newly published books on fundraising. 3. Direct, Box 4949, Stamford, CT 06907–0949. 16 issues per year, $85 annual subscription; occasionally carries an article featuring an outstanding direct mail fundraising program. 4. DM News, 19 West 21st Street, New York, NY 10010, www.dmnews.com. 48 issues per year, $49 annual subscription; a controlled circulation publication offered free to a ﬁxed number of qualiﬁed U.S. subscribers meeting certain criteria; a waiting period of up to two months for new subscriptions; mostly about commercial direct marketing but covers direct mail fundraising from time to time as well and offers free e-news on-line. 5. Newsletter of the DMA Nonproﬁt Federation, 1111 19th Street, N.W., Suite 1180, Washington, DC 20036, nonproﬁ[email protected]. Excellent for members; focuses on direct response fundraising. 6. Give & Take: News and Ideas for Development Executives of Nonproﬁt Organizations, Robert F. Sharpe & Co., Inc., 6410 Poplar Avenue, Suite 700, Memphis, TN 38119, www.rfsco.com. Published monthly by Bob and Tim Sharpe, specialists in legacy giving, and reﬂects that focus; promotional in purpose (Sharpe and Co. sells planned giving newsletters) but always features well-written and informative articles of substance on topics related to legacy giving; available in HTML format on-line as well as in print.

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7. Grassroots Fundraising Journal, 3781 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94611, www.grassrootsfundraising.org. 6 issues per year, $32 annual subscription; a bimonthly magazine published by the legendary Kim Klein, one of the nation’s most gifted fundraisers for community-based social change organizations, frequently featuring articles whose wisdom transcends the limitations of small, local nonproﬁts. 8. Inside Direct Mail (incorporating Who’s Mailing What!), North American Publishing Company, 401 North Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19108-1001. 12 issues per year, $195 annual subscription, US$235 in Canada. For years, Who’s Mailing What! reﬂected the colorful and always interesting views of its founder and editor, direct mail copywriter Denny Hatch, writing from his home in Connecticut. Denny sold the company years ago, and it’s now being published by a largely new crew in Philadelphia. It’s gotten slick and much less interesting but is still useful for the professional engaged in direct mail of any kind; features fundraising packages from time to time. 9. Mal Warwick’s Newsletter: Successful Direct Mail, Telephone & Online Fundraising, Strathmoor Press, Inc., 2550 Ninth Street, Suite 103, Berkeley, CA 94710-2551, www.malwarwick.com. 6 issues per year, introductory subscription $49.95, US$69 in Canada; free issue available on-line at my Web site. 10. Professional Fundraising, Subscription Department, 39-41 North Road, London N7 9DP, UK. Twice a month except for single issues in December and January, $75 annual subscription for an individual, $90 for a charity, $110 for an institution; lively and informative about fundraising issues and practices in the U.K.; no special focus on direct response. 11. The NonProﬁt Times, 120 Littleton Road, Suite 120, Parsippany, NJ 070541803. 24 issues per year, free subscriptions only for full-time U.S. nonproﬁt executives, $65 annual subscription, US$89 in Canada.

The Eight Most Useful On-Line Resources 1. changingourworld.com A site maintained by a subsidiary of one of the world’s largest advertising agencies, the Omnicom Group, that offers fundraising and philanthropy services. 2. clickz.com A well-developed commercial site that features a wealth of information and insight about on-line marketing.

Resource F: Reading List and On-Line Resources

3. donordigital.com A lively site that features current examples of state-of-theart on-line fundraising, marketing, and advocacy; edited by Donordigital’s extremely knowledgeable president, Nick Allen, and vice president, Madeline Stanionis; sign-ups available for Donordigital’s free electronic newsletter. 4. gilbert.org Site of The Gilbert Organization developed by e-mail maven Michael Gilbert; publishes a respected free, very useful weekly, “Nonproﬁt Online News: News of the Online Nonproﬁt Community.” 5. www.canadianfundraiser.com Sign-ups available for the free “Canadian Fundraiser E-News,” which devotes itself to matters Canadian but often has provocative articles about broader fundraising topics of interest to others as well. 6. www.levison.com Written by Ivan Levison, a brilliant copywriter who makes a living largely by writing for high-tech companies; a free monthly newsletter on copywriting, both direct mail and e-mail, that is often directly pertinent to the challenges we face in writing fundraising appeals; newsletter can be ordered. 7. www.malwarwick.com Includes more information about direct mail and other aspects of direct response fundraising than anything else on the World Wide Web today; sign-ups available for free monthly electronic newsletter, “Mal Warwick’s Successful Fundraising Online,” which features some of the material included in my print newsletter but is mostly original material. 8. yesmail.com A commercial site that focuses on “permission marketing” and offers a free bimonthly e-newsletter, “Email Insider.”

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References

Burk, P. Thanks! A Guide to Donor-Centred Fundraising. Toronto: Burk & Associates, Ltd., 2000. Burk, P. Donor Centered Fundraising: How to Hold On to Your Donors and Raise Much More Money, Burk & Associates, Ltd., 2003. Burnett, K. Relationship Fundraising. (2nd ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002. Craver, R. “Green Pages.” Co-Op America. Fund Raising Management, 1989. Huntsinger, J. Fund Raising Management, 1989. McKinnon, H. Hidden Gold: How Monthly Giving Will Build Donor Loyalty, Boost Your Organization’s Income, and Increase Financial Stability. Chicago: Bonus Books, 1999. Ray, P. H., and Anderson, S. R. The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World. New York: Harmony Books, 2000. Warwick, M. Five Strategies for Fundraising Success. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000. Warwick, M. How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters. (rev. ed.) San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2001. Warwick, M. Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3: Raise More Money with Direct Mail Tests. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. Warwick, M., Hart, T., and Allen, N. (eds.). Fundraising on the Internet: The ePhilanthropy Foundation.Org’s Guide to Success Online. (2nd ed.) San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2002.

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Index

A Anderson, J., 2 Anderson, S. R., 231 “Anniversary date,” 128 Annual fund (or campaign), 126, 127–129 Annual giving: annual renewal series for, 126, 127–129; four methods used for, 125–126; hypothetical mailing schedules for, 127; membership programs for, 126, 134–137; outlining donor beneﬁts of, 129, 134 Annual giving clubs: basic ingredients of successful, 154–159; described, 153–154; giving levels in typical high-dollar, 160; renewing/upgrading high-dollar donors, 160–161; sample highdollar invitation package for, 155–158; telephone contact to recruit into, 165; typical beneﬁts for high-dollar, 159 Annual giving structure, 32

B Back-end premiums, 83–86 Ben & Jerry, 232, 233 Bequest promotion letter, 181 The Body Shop, 232, 233 BRE (business reply envelope), 73, 75 Bread for the World newsletter, 178 Brochure, 76, 77 “Buckslips,” 76 Burk, P., 184 Burnett, K., 203, 204

Business for Social Responsibility, 233 Buyers direct mail category, 36

C The Campaign case study, 99–100 “Card decks,” 69 CARE, 240 Center for Humanity’s Progress, 189–190 Change permanence, 242–243 Charities: available estimates on funds raised by, 11; funding sources for, 11–12; growing competition among, 6 CITIZENS FOR donor base strategies, 93–98 Climate change: economic disruption due to, 235–236; health implications of, 235; long-term implications of, 234–235; rising waters due to, 236; shrinking habitats due to, 236 Co-Op America, 233 Co-op mailings, 209 Cold mail. See Donor acquisition mailings Communication channels, 236–237 Compassion fatigue, 242 Compiled lists, 36 Computerization: direct mail fundraising management using, 5; donor ﬁle segmentation using, 5. See also Technology Cone/Roper Cause-Related Marketing Trends Report (1999), 233 Copywriting, 55

Corporate ethos, 229–230 Corporations: as charitable/public interest funding source, 12; supremacy trend of, 228–230 Costs: cost-effectiveness as more important than, 31, 217; direct mail postage, 70, 72, 73, 75; donor acquisition direct mail, 17; importance of tracking direct mail, 120–123; of initial testing of direct mailing, 60–61; raising more money vs. lowering direct mail, 117–118; telephone fundraising, 171 Craver, R., 1, 3, 4 Cultivation: donor retention and, 114–115, 258; letters for member, 197–201 Cultural context shifts: social responsibility in business, 232–234; socially responsible investing, 231–232; studies/research on, 230–231 The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Ray and Anderson), 231 Cultural Creatives values, 231, 233

D “Data card,” 37, 38 Dees, M., 2 Dennis, S., 245 Design: mastering production and, 65–66; as success/failure factor, 55 Designer, 65–66 Direct dialogue technique, 209

319

320 Direct mail communications: different types of, 16; examples of cultivation, 197–201; ﬁve divergent path development using, 13–14; as information source, 3; seven categories of, 36; various examples of types/functions, 12–13. See also Telephone fundraising Direct mail cost-effectiveness: building donor base and, 87–89; as more important than costs, 31; segmentation as key to, 32 Direct mail costs: cost-effectiveness as more important than, 31; donor acquisition, 17; importance of tracking, 120–123; of initial test mailing, 60–61; postage, 70, 72, 73, 75; raising more money vs. lowering, 117–118 Direct mail fundraising: basic precepts of fundraising respected by, 272; begins/ends with thank-you, 184–188; changing techniques of, 220–221; described, 210; early experiments in political, 1–3; 11 principles of, 31–33; hurdles/barriers to, 29–31; mailing schedule for three-track, 20; marketing concept used in, 56–60; as problem-solving tool, 28–29; realistic expectations of, 14–16; simpliﬁed segmentation plan for annual, 21; speciﬁc advantages of, 3–4; success/failure factors of, 53–56; technological/economic trends contributing to, 4–8; telephone contact combined with, 166. See also Telephone fundraising Direct mail fundraising package: additional enclosures in, 76–77, 79; back-end premiums included in, 83–85; brochures included in, 76, 77; front-end premiums as part of, 76, 78, 82–83, 85–86; letter included in, 70, 72–73; outer envelope, 69–70, 71–72; postage for, 70; putting together the, 77–78, 80; reply devices included in, 73, 74, 141; reply envelope included in, 73, 75; UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists), 250–256; welcome package form of, 189–190

Index

Direct mail fundraising trends: computerization, 5–6; growing competition among charities, 6; inﬂation impact on economics of, 6–7; “list hygiene” mailing standards, 7; new standards of success, 7–8; telephone fundraising as part of direct mail, 7; testing by fundraisers, 6 Direct mail strategies: case study 1: tactics dictated by, 22–23; case study 2: tactics don’t always work, 24–25; case study 3: tactics affecting, 25–26; case study 4: time is a strategic tool, 26–28; importance of planning, 22 Direct mail success/failure factors: copywriting, 55; design, 55; the format, 54–55; importance of, 53–54; list selection, 54; the offer, 54; timing as, 55–56 Direct mail tactics: case study 1: strategy dictated by, 22–23; case study 2: tactics don’t always work, 24–25; case study 3: strategy affected by, 25–26 Direct response TV, 211 Directors and Executives, 120 The Domain Group, 183 Donor acknowledgment. See Thankyou letters Donor acquisition mailings: choosing lists for, 35–40; donor’s value over time and costs of, 17; mailing quantities in typical ﬁrst-year program, 19; management time spent on, 14–15; process of, 16–18; resolicitation mailings vs, 18; three-track mailing schedule including, 20; timeline for test of, 63. See also Prospect mailing lists Donor afﬁnity, 39–40 Donor base building: alternative approaches to, 98–99; The Campaign direct mail strategy for, 99–100; comparing CITIZENS FOR/PEOPLE AGAINST, 93–98; continuous cultivation for maintaining, 114–115; as difference between success and failure, 87–89; during ﬁrst three years, 92–95; focusing on key donors

for, 118–120; frequency of contacts for, 111–115; frequency of mailing for, 116–117; how to choose list for, 89–92; The Institute strategies for, 100–101; lowering costs vs. raising more money and, 117–118; method for calculating donor value and, 106–111; tracking direct mail costs of, 120–123 Donor Bill of Rights, 191 Donor Centered Fundraising: How to Hold On to Your Donors and Raise Much More Money (Burk), 184 Donor commitment, 105–106 Donor cultivation, 114–115 Donor education: legacy giving and, 180; through telephone contact, 166; through Web sites, 211. See also Information Donor history, 39 Donor interest, 105 Donor legacy. See Legacy Donor life cycle, 105–106 Donor loyalty building, 167 Donor Loyalty Cycle, 183–184 Donor renewal series, 32 Donor resolicitation mailings: donor acquisition vs, 18; overall plan for representative renewal, 20; process of, 18–19, 21; quantities in typical ﬁrst-year program, 19; segmenting donor ﬁle for, 48–49, 51; three-track mailing schedule including, 20; timing and frequency of, 111 Donor retention: cultivation for, 114–115, 258; cultivation letters to encourage, 197–201 Donor support, 105 Donor telephone numbers, 168 Donor-advised funds, 237–238 Donor-centered fundraising: communications/cultivation as center of, 183–184; ﬁve assumptions of, 203–204; Four Is of, 190, 196– 197; marketer’s vs. fundraiser’s approach and, 202–203 Donors: “anniversary date” of, 128; annual giving by, 125–137, 153–161, 165; attrition over ten years in hypothetical program,

321

Index

115; average number of fund appeals sent to, 15–16; calculating value over time of, 17; calculating worth of, 106–111; computerized personalization of, 5; converting activists into direct response, 165; as direct mail category, 36; legacy giving by, 173–182; marketing concept and perceived return by, 56–57; maximizing value of, 105–123; merge-purge of duplicate, 5–6, 44–47; monthly giving by, 126, 139–151, 165; motivations of, 81–82; relationship fundraising and, 5; retention rates of, 15; schematic representation of overlapping interests of, 43; telephone acknowledgment of, 166; telephone communication to reactivate lapsed, 165. See also Gifts; Segmentation Door-to-door canvassing, 210

E E-mail newsletters, 210 “Emergency” fundraising appeals: revenue raised during, 114; telephone fundraising used during, 164 End Injustice Now! case study, 85 Envelopes: BRE (business reply envelope), 73, 75; outer, 69–70, 71– 72; reply, 73, 75. See also Letters Environmental issues: implications of climate change, 234–236; UCS work on behalf of, 247–248 Ethnic majority trend, 226–228

F Face-to-face contact, 210 Ferman, E., 245 Five Strategies for Fundraising Success (Warwick), 14 Five-effort annual renewal series: key elements of, 130–133; timeline for hypothetical, 128 FLA Group, 174 Format factor, 54–55 Foundation Directory, 120 Foundations: as charitable/public interest funding source, 12; venture philanthropy of, 237–238

Four I’s of fundraising: identify, 190, 197; inform, 190, 196–197; interest, 190, 196; involve, 190, 196 Frequency segment criteria, 48 Front-end premiums: case studies on use of, 85–86; described, 76, 78; pros and cons of, 82–83 Fund Raising Management (April 1989), 1, 3, 6 Fundraisers: comparing fundraising approach by marketer’s and, 202– 203; new media mix approach used by, 209–211, 213; testing done by, 6 Fundraising: basic precepts of, 272; changing techniques of direct response, 220–221; continuing fundamentals of, 219, 221–222; four I’s of, 190, 196–197; integrated, 213–218; new media mix approach of, 209–211, 213; technology and future of, 219; threeyear monthly schedule for, 212 Fundraising letters. See Letters

G Gifts: calculating donor value by level of, 106–111; designation by wealthy donors, 238; focus on key donors of major, 118–120; legacy giving, 173–182; levels of typical high-dollar annual giving club, 160; nature of thank-you and amount of, 188. See also Donors; Repeat gift strategies Giving clubs, 113–114, 259–261 Giving USA 2003: The Annual Report on Philanthropy for the Year 2002, 173, 240 Giving and Volunteering in the United States, 2001, 11 Globalization, 240–241 “Good ideas” category, 36 Government grants, 11–12

H Habitat for Humanity, 240 Hart, G., 2 Hidden Gold (McKinnon), 143 High-dollar annual giving clubs. See Annual giving clubs

How to Write Successful Fundraising Letters (Warwick), 56, 134 Huntsinger, J., 6, 7

I Identify acquisition stage, 190, 197 Income gap, 241–242 Inform acquisition stage, 190, 196–197 Information: direct mail fundraising as source of, 3; Web sites as sources of, 211. See also Donor education Initial test mailing: budget for, 61; costs of, 60–61; overview of, 60–62 Inquirers direct mail category, 36 The Institute, 100–101 Integrated fundraising: described, 214–215; eight principles of, 215–218; media mix used in, 213–214; premise of, 218 Integrated fundraising principles: attention on cost-effectiveness over cost, 217; clear and consistent message, 215–216; considering donor’s point of view, 215; continued used of direct mail, 217–218; focus on big picture, 215; segment audience for maximum impact, 216–217; using tools of marketing/public relations, 218 Interest acquisition stage, 190, 196 Involve acquisition stage, 190, 196

J Jackson, J., 2

K Kendall, H. W., 257 Kennedy, J. F., 243 King, M. L., Jr., 243

L Lang Research, 174 Legacy, 106 Legacy giving: bequest promotion letter, 181; cultivating/education potential donors of, 180, 182; donors with highest propensity for, 179–180; research on patterns

322 of, 173–175; selecting target audience for, 179–180; setting your strategy for, 175–176; UCS promotion of, 262–263 “Legacy of Hope” newsletter (Bread for the World), 178 Legacy newsletter, 177–179 Legacy society: launching a, 176–177; promotion mailing insert from, 177 Letters: bequest promotion, 181; examples of cultivation, 197–201; fundraising, 70, 72–73; “lift,” 76; monthly giving program invitation, 150; thank-you, 184, 185– 188. See also Envelopes Lettershop, 66 Life expectancy, 225–226 “Lift letters,” 76 List brokers: access to lists using, 36–37, 65; “data cards” used by, 37, 38 “List hygiene” mailing standards, 7 List owners, 65 List selection model, 89–92 Lists. See Prospect mailing lists

M McGovern, G., 2 McKinnon, H., 143 Magazine ads, 210 Mail-responsiveness, 39 Mailing lists. See Prospect mailing lists Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc., 174, 245, 248 Marketer’s fundraising approach, 202–203 Marketing concepts: citing organizations in examples of, 58–59; deﬁning, 56; effective segmentation requiring use of, 216–217; four examples of, 57–58; importance of donor return to, 56–57; using teasers as part of, 59–60 Marketing tools, 218 Mathews, T., 2 Media mix: divergence in communications channels and, 236–237; used in fundraising schedule, 211–213; integrated fundraising

Index

using, 213–218; types listed, 209–211 Members direct mail category, 36 Membership (or donor) programs: four-year summary of UCS direct mail, 249; member beneﬁts of, 134, 136–137; UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) 1999, 258; UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) 2000, 262; UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) 2001, 268; UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) 2002, 269; yearly calendar basis of, 126 Merge-purge: described, 5–6; handling duplicate appeals using, 44–47; simpliﬁed representation of small, 47 Merge-purge house, 65 Merge-Purge Summary Report, 46 Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra case study, 86 Minardi, M., 245 Monetary amount (segmentation criteria), 48 Monthly giving invitation, 148–149 Monthly giving invitation letter, 150 Monthly giving (sustainer or pledge): building program for, 145, 147– 148; choosing gift payment options for, 142–143, 145; described, 126; long-term income from, 144; longterm income from new multidonors, 146; renewing/upgrading monthly donors, 149, 151; research on attractions of, 139–140, 142; response device for, 141; telephone contact to recruit for, 165 Monthly sustainer programs, 113

N National Committee on Planned Giving, 15, 173 National Green Pages, 2002 Edition (Co-Op America), 233 NCOA (new national change of address system), 7 New-member welcome package letter, 189–190, 192–195 Newsletters: e-mail, 210; legacy, 177–179

Newspaper ads, 210 Newspaper free-standing inserts, 210

O Offer structure, 54 Organizational list exchange, 42–43 Outer envelope, 69–70, 71–72

P Package inserts, 210 PACs (political action committees), 2–3 Patagonia, 232, 233 Payroll deduction programs, 210–211 PEOPLE AGAINST donor base strategies, 93–98 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, 240 Personalization, 54 Personalized new-gift thank-you, 186–187 Planned Giving in the United States 2000: A Survey of Donors, 173 Postage: for direct mail package, 70, 72; for reply envelope, 73, 75 Premiums: back-end, 83–85; case studies on use of, 85–86; frontend, 76, 78, 82–83; as involvement devices, 85 The President’s Circle, 113–114 Printers, 66 Privacy issues, 239 Prospect mailing lists: for acquisition rollout mailing, 41; “data cards” used for, 37, 38; using list brokers for, 36–37; list selection model for, 89–92; marketplace of, 40–47; recency and accuracy of, 39; as success/failure factor, 54; for test mailing, 40. See also Donor acquisition mailings Prospect mailing lists marketplace: exchanging, 42–43; handling duplicate appeals, 43–47; onetime use basis of, 40; rental basis of, 42 Public relations, 218

R Radio ads/appeals, 211

323

Index

Ray, P. H., 230–231 Reagan, R., 2 Recency criteria: of prospect mailing lists, 39; segments deﬁnition and, 48 Record-keeping principle, 33 Register of Corporations (Standard & Poor’s), 120 Relationship fundraising, 5 Renewal mailing: including brochure in, 76; key elements of ﬁve-effort, 130–133; schedule for hypothetical five-effort, 128; telephoning fundraising to facilitate, 165; timing/ frequency/function of, 111–115 Repeat gift strategies: for annual giving, 125–137; for monthly giving, 126, 139–151. See also Gifts Repetition principle, 32 Reply devices: included in direct mail package, 73, 74; monthly giving program, 141 Reply envelope, 73, 75 Resolicitation. See Donor resolicitation mailings Rich/poor gap, 241–242 Ris, H. C. (“Bud”), 245

S Save the Children, 240 Segmentation: computerization of donor ﬁle, 5; of key donors, 118– 120; as key to cost-effectiveness, 32; for maximum impact in integrated fundraising, 216–217; for resolicitation mailings, 48–49, 51; three-dimensional representation of simple plan of, 49; varying marketing concepts for effective, 216–217. See also Donors September 11 (2001), 263 Share Group, 164 Sharpe, R. F., Jr., 174 Signer selection, 62, 64–65 Single-issue advocacy groups, 3 Social responsibility in business, 232–234 Social Venture Network, 233 Source (or channel) criteria, 48 Special appeal mailing: described, 211; to encourage annual gifts,

125; ﬂashcount for, 50; including brochure in, 76; telephone contact to issue, 165–166; UCS highdollar giving club, 259–261 Standard & Poor’s Register of Corporations, Directors and Executives, 120 Star Wars (1980s), 248 Subscribers direct mail category, 36 Suzio, D., 245 Sweepstakes entrants category, 36 Swenson, M., 245

T Tagger, P., 2 Target Analysis Group, 245 Teasers, 59–60 Technology: contributing to direct mail fundraising, 4–8; future of fundraising and, 219. See also Computerization Telemarketing, 211 Telephone contact rate, 168 Telephone fulﬁllment rate, 168 Telephone fundraising: advantages of using, 166–167; costs of, 171; described, 163–164; fundamental concepts of, 167–168; increasing use of, 7; realistic expectations of, 168–171; ten principal applications of, 164–166; text-messaging as part of, 211. See also Direct mail fundraising Telephone fundraising package, 170 Telephone pledge rate, 168 Television appeals, 211 Test mailing: budget for typical 50,000-piece, 61; choosing the right signer for, 62, 64–65; by fundraisers, 6; incremental improvements over time using, 32; initial, 60–62; lists of lists for acquisition, 40; marketing concept preparation and, 56–60; selecting best time for, 66–67 Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3: Raise More Money with Direct Mail Tests (Warwick), 26 Text-messaging, 211 Thank-you letters: amount of gifts and, 188; dos and don’ts of, 185–

188; effective fundraising as beginning/ending with, 184; personalized new-gift, 186–187; telephone acknowledgment instead of, 166 Thanks! A Guide to Donor-Centered Fundraising (Burk), 184 Third (or independent) sector, 12 Three-Mile Island (1979), 245 Timeline: for acquisition test mailing, 63; for hypothetical ﬁve-effort renewal series, 128; for hypothetical three-year monthly schedule, 212; for mailing schedules to encourage repeat gifts, 127; to maintain donor value, 116–117; selecting best, 66–67; as success/failure factor, 55–56 Tocqueville, A. de, 12, 230 Tom’s of Maine, 232 Trends: continuing globalization, 240–241; direct mail fundraising, 5–8; divergence in communications, 236–237; emerging ethnic majority, 226–228; gift designation by donors, 238; growing gap between rich and poor, 241–242; growing U.S. population, 224–225; implications of climate change, 234–236; longer life expectancy, 225–226; permanence of change, 242–243; rising concern with privacy, 239; shifting cultural context as, 230–234; supremacy of the corporation, 228–230; venture philanthropy, 237–238

U UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists): achievements of, 247–248; challenges confronting, 248–249; four-year overview of fundraising (1999–2002) by, 249–272 UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) fundraising: beginning legacy promotion, 262–263; four-year summary of, 249–250; high-dollar renewal/upgrading, 258–261; lapsed member reactivation, 257– 258; member cultivation efforts, 258; membership acquisition

324 package, 250–256; monthly giving program conversion/upgrade, 270–272; Year 1: converting to membership program, 250–257; Year 2: focusing on member involvement/upgrading, 257–262; Year 3: beginning legacy promotion, 262–263; Year 4: continuing growth in challenging times, 263– 272; year-end appeal, 264–267 U.S. population: emerging ethnic majority of, 226–228; growing income gap of, 241–242; growth

Index

of, 224–225; life expectancy of, 225–226 U.S. Postal Service: “list hygiene” mailing standards of, 7; rules/regulations for design by, 65; variety of postal rates/delivery options of, 70, 72, 73, 75; Zip codes of, 4

V Venture philanthropy, 237–238 Viguerie, R., 2, 4

Wallace, G., 2 Web sites: including URL in communications, 218; information availability on, 211 Welcome package, 189–190, 192–195 Whalen, D., 245 Who’s Who, 120 Working Assets, 232 World Vision, 240

W

Z

Wall Street Journal, 17

Zip codes, 4

I Want to Hear From You!

O

nce you’ve read this book, I want to hear from you. I want to know if you take issue with something in these pages. If your experience with direct mail fundraising has taught you a lesson I haven’t learned, I want you to tell me about it. The same goes if you have illuminating facts at your ﬁngertips or fascinating stories about direct mail fundraising or important arguments I’ve ignored. Please contact me at Mal Warwick & Associates, Inc., 2550 Ninth Street, Suite 103, Berkeley, CA 94710; e-mail: [email protected], and check out my Web site at www.malwarwick.com. I’ll do my best to answer you. And someday, perhaps, I may immortalize your contribution in a further revised edition of Revolution in the Mailbox. Thank you for your support.

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